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The cost of cotton: Funding exploitation

Forced Labour in the fields; Fat Cats in the government

Cotton fuels human rights abuses in Uzbekistan

• Uzbekistan is the world’s second largest cotton exporter, with more than US$1 billion generated through cotton export each year.

Uzbekistan is an authoritarian state, where public demonstrations are repressed, and human rights activists attacked and tortured. Cotton provides the majority of the country’s export earnings. However, despite the wealth generated through cotton production, most of the cotton labourers live in poverty.

The corrupt and dictatorial government has set up a system of compulsory state procurement, ensuring a few rich businessmen with close connections to the government are capturing all the profits. Farmers are forced to produce a certain amount of cotton each year, and then hand it over to the state. In return they receive a tiny fraction of the cotton’s value. The World Bank found that nearly half the population live on less than $2.15 per day.

According to the Environmental Justice Foundation, tens of thousands of children, some as young as seven, are taken out of school and forced to work in the cotton fields for little or no money during the harvest in order to meet official imposed quotas. The combined effect of exhausting work, a poor diet and exposure to toxic pesticides has a dramatic impact on health.

“It’s so hot in the fields and the chemicals burn your skin if they touch it” Complaint by one child (EJF, White Gold: The true cost of cotton)

Who buys Uzbekistan’s cotton?

Europe buys almost a third of Uzbekistan’s cotton.

The middle-men

Most cotton is bought by international ‘Commodity traders’ who then sell it on in international markets.

Traders buying cotton from Uzbekistan are supporting a system that suppresses human rights, yet their role rarely faces public scrutiny.

The power of these companies stands in stark contract to the power of those picking the cotton they trade. For example, Cargill Cotton UK is part of Cargill Incorporated, one of the largest privately owned companies in the world, which in August 2007 reported its ‘fifth consecutive year of record earnings’.

The International Crisis Group found most traders take the attitude that how cotton is grown is just not their problem. Begin to make it their problem by sending an email asking them about their ethical sourcing policies: see the box to the right for details.

The retailers

Unfortunately, information on where the cotton in most clothing was grown is hard to find. Retailers do not have to provide this information, and many claim they just don’t know, insisting their supply chains are too complex for them to possibly find out.

In many ways retailers may prefer not to know — believing ignorance allows them to wash their hands of any responsibility for the conditions so many cotton producers labour under. But just as equally complex food supply chains can be traced ‘from farm to fork’, retailers could do the same with cotton — ‘from seed to shirt’.

Retailers can choose to continue to support exploitation in the fields, or they could choose to support sustainable production that contributes to people’s livelihoods.

When information on the conditions under which cotton is grown is available to consumers they too can make this choice - and we can hold retailers to account.

Previous: Dirty Cotton | next: Sweatshopping: introduction

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Sources and further reading

• BBC Newsnight report into how Uzbek cotton - picked with forced child labour reaches the UK high street.

• White Gold: The True Cost of cotton, Environmental Justice Foundation, 2005, London, UK. ISBN: 1-904253-08-0.

This report uncovers forced child labour, human rights abuses and environmental destruction in Uzbekistan. EJF, a UK based NGO, is committed to eradicating child labour and the deadliest pesticides from cotton production and promoting organic alternatives. EJF campaigns to raise public awareness to press retailers to only sell “clean cotton”; for an EU regulation on forced child labour; and for cotton products to show the country of origin of the cotton on the label.

• The Curse of Cotton: Central Asia’s Destructive Monoculture,, International Crisis Group , February 2005.

This report from the International Crisis Group “examines the corrosive role cotton plays in Uzbekistan, Tajikistan and Turkmenistan. Comprehensive reform of the industry is desperately needed to address the political, economic, social and environmental problems facing the region. The international community, which has a direct stake in Central Asia’s cotton sector, has a responsibility to get involved.”

• Uzbekistan: Country Reports on Human Rights Practices, 2006, United States Department of State, March 2007.

Each year, the Bureau of Democracy Human Rights and Labor, in the US Department of State “develops, edits, and submits to Congress a 5,000-page report on human rights conditions in over 190 countries”

• Uzbekistan, Country Brief 2006, World Bank, The World Bank Group, updated September 2006.

Key statistics on Uzbekistan, data and analysis of the economy, and details of World Bank programs in the country.

Other resources

• Watch ‘White Gold, The True Cost of Cotton’ an eight minute film from the Environmental Justice Foundation, online.

• Craig Murray’s weblog on Uzbekistan

“As Britain’s outspoken Ambassador to the Central Asian Republic of Uzbekistan, Craig Murray helped expose vicious human rights abuses by the US-funded regime of Islam Karimov. He is now a prominent critic of Western policy in the region.”