Tajikistan: Cotton Harvest Depends on Student Labor

Along a dusty road in Khatlon Province, the heartland of Tajikistan's cotton economy, propaganda billboards show sleek machinery gathering the crop. In reality, most of those Soviet-era harvesters broke down long ago, meaning nearly all of Tajikistan's cotton must be picked by hand.

For college students, a tour in the fields is a regular part of the curriculum. Every fall, the classrooms empty and young people spend nine or more hours a day, seven days per week picking cotton under the autumn sun, which, in Tajikistan, can still burn.

Ruslan, an 18-year-old student at the Nursing College in the southern city of Kulob, savors his mid-day break. It is 12:30 pm and his 50-student work brigade has been picking cotton for four hours already. The hour-long break mainly offers an opportunity to doze. Lunch isn't anything to get excited about, consisting of bread and vegetable soup. While his classmates eat watermelon, Ruslan uses bread to gather every last drop of soup from the bottom of a wooden collective bowl.

A teacher, who during the harvest transforms into the student/worker brigadier, explains that providing nutritional meals has become increasingly difficult in recent years. "The price of bread has increased a lot. ... That's why we have been unable to buy them meat since they have been in the fields," said the teacher, who wore a blue UNICEF cap with the slogan "Unite the Children" written on it.

Technically, the students are in the fields by choice. But volunteerism seems to be loosely interpreted when it comes to the cotton harvest. Bobo Shamsov, a dean at the Kulob Nursing College, explains; "Sometimes, some [students] refuse to go to the cotton fields. In this case, we call the parents and give them a first warning. If they still refuse to go, they loose their grants. And if that is not enough, they are expelled from the college."

This year, 3,250 students overall from Kulob are spending the fall in the fields. At the Nursing College, only fourth-year students are exempt from harvesting. On Sundays, students from area elementary schools even pitch in.

The practice of students interrupting their education to help with the harvest dates back to the Soviet era. Although Tajikistan's agricultural sector has technically undergone privatization, the country's farmers still depend heavily on student labor to gather the cotton crop. The reliance on students is now perhaps greater than ever, given that a large percentage of Tajik working-age men are migrant workers and are often abroad for long stretches of time. [For background see the Eurasia Insight archive].

The students have little say in how they are deployed during the harvest season. "There is no contract signed with the students themselves. There is just an agreement between the university and the farmers who need students to pick up the cotton," said Homid Abdulloyev, Kulob's mayor.

According to several students, administrators often try to link job performance to academics. One, a third-year student at Kulob's Nursing College, confided that students were told that those who picked 100 kilograms of cotton or more per day would receive better grades. "Most of the girls can't gather more than 30 kilograms, when the norm is 55," the student explained. "Because of that, every evening, after weighing, they put us in a line and reprimand the ones who worked badly."

Teachers also feel the strain of the existing system, as they face constant pressure to ensure student/harvesters to meet quotas. This year, Tajik officials have set a harvest target of 550,000 tons. As of late September, about 40 percent of that total had been gathered, Tajik officials announced. In 2006, the government reported the cotton harvest to be just over 440,000 tons.

Officially, a student is paid 15 dirams (4 US cents) per kilo of picked cotton, a fairly decent rate in a country where a typical rural resident earns roughly $20 per month. But many students report that they don't have much left to show for their field work after expenses for food and other items are deducted from their harvest tally. "I collect 30 – 40 kilograms of cotton a day. Last year, for the whole season, I received 30 somonis [about $8.72] because money for our food was excluded from what we earned," said a second-year student at the Nursing School.

Now that it is getting into late October, officials are intent on maintaining a high harvesting pace, hoping to gather a few extra tons of good-quality cotton before the autumn rains set in. In Khamadoni, a village in Khatlon Province, village elders, along with the local farm chief and the imam, turned out on the main square one day recently to urge on the harvesters.

Hajimurad Fazlidinov, Khamadoni's agricultural chief, says the biggest challenge facing the village is getting enough people to go out into the fields. "We're waiting for busses of students coming from other districts," Fazlidinov said. "For 15 dirams a kilogram, nobody wants to come in the fields."