Uzbekistan’s Controversial Cotton Harvest ‘Feeds the Regime, not Citizens’ · Global Voices
Zukhra Iakupbaeva

Buses take children and adults alike to pick cotton in Uzbekistan's fields. Screenshot taken from video uploaded by Kudrat Babadjanov.
The cotton-picking season in Uzbekistan has officially finished, but according to reports, teachers and schoolchildren continue to labor in the fields. Provincial leaders are known to apply physical force against farmers failing to meet cotton targets, while a recent report suggests that income from cotton production may bypass the state budget. Few people associated with the authoritarian republic are surprised by the report's findings.
Uzbekistan is famous for forced labor and child labor in particular. In 2009 a publication by The School of Oriental and African Studies (SOAS) in London claimed that at least 86% of schools in the districts encountered by the study during the 2008 cotton season were subjected to compulsory recruitment requests from the government. Recruits were children between the ages of 11 and 14, who were expected to gather between 15-70 kilograms of cotton per day depending on their age and the stage of the harvest. Six years later, despite the relative success of an ongoing campaign to force manufacturers to boycott Uzbek cotton, little has changed inside the country. Uzbekistan was the sixth biggest producer in the world last harvest, and kids are still contributing to the cause.
A report produced last month reveals that income from the harvest goes into an opaque extra-budgetary sovereign wealth fund called Selkhozfond, about which almost nothing is known. The authors of the Soros working paper Uzbekistan's Cotton Sector: Financial Flows and Distribution of Resources, who cooperated with a former government official in producing the report, had to make full use of their sources just to learn the full name of Selkhozfond director Shukrullo Umurov.
[Uzbek President Islam] Karimov shamelessly violates the criminal code under articles such as “fraud,” “appropriation of state property” etc. The entire economy is built like a mafia economy. Stolen money goes into Western banks. These “white and fluffy” bankers bear the guilt for all the country's ills.
Should we not reform an industry that is constantly experiencing stress and increasingly destroys the  environment? In Uzbekistan's climatic conditions, it is much more profitable and environmentally friendly to grow and process fruits and vegetables, and cotton is risky for the farming culture of the country.
Karimov's regime is unable to reform the cotton sector (moreover, to cut it down or reduce cotton production) because, as correctly pointed out in the article [report], cotton feeds the political regime, not citizens of the country.
Article 37 of the Constitution of the Republic of Uzbekistan as well as article 7 of the Labor Code  prohibit forced labor. But what if an order [to collect cotton] is given by the Prime-Minister or even by the President, and many millions are obeying? And what if the same people who wrote these laws, the prosecutors, the police, the security services and the army are turned on you in order to force you to collect cotton – what will you do then?
“Why do I have to collect cotton?” Because it was planted. We need to abandon cotton cultivation in Uzbekistan completely. The cotton crop is a plantation crop that requires constant care and water. All plantations require slaves and a colonial system of management. Uzbekistan should be growing food to feed its large population instead. But then the colonial regime would collapse. Can you imagine Uzbekistan without cotton?