Tashkent’s annual two-day International Cotton and Textile Fair opened this week, and 330 companies from 38 countries around the world showed up. The Uzbek government boasted that 30 more companies participated than last year, and that sellers took in some $550 million in orders for Uzbek cotton – more than last year’s $500 million, although the volume was lower (the price of cotton has doubled since last year).
Uzbekistan had some new customers such as Pakistan, whose own cotton industry was hurt by flooding in the last year, prompting them to purchase from Tashkent. Russia is still Uzbekistan’s largest customer, mainly for its domestic garment industry, and China, India and other countries in South Asia are also big buyers.
Yet according to press reports, no Western company was present, although several trade associations with European leaders participated. More than 60 US and EU companies have announced their intentions to avoid sourcing their products in Uzbek cotton, including big name brands such as Wal-Mart, Marks & Spencer, Tesco, The Gap, and Gymboree, and none of them were present at the fair,
So it appeared as if Westerners are largely refraining from buying Uzbek cotton, yet Uzbekistan got along fine without the Western business, which never made up a significant share of its revenue. Does this mean boycotts don’t work? Certainly, the intense debate running between human rights activists and practitioners of Realpolitik means that the jury is still out.
The question is how to decide what criteria would be universally acceptable to say that a boycott (really more of a pledge to try to avoid sourcing in Uzbek cotton) could be expected to work. After all, the purpose of a boycott on human rights grounds – ending forced child labor in Uzbekistan – is not to cripple a country’s industry or reduce sales per se. Rather, the goal is to try to use such leverage as a buyer may have to affect a change of bad behavior. Activists find that the boycott is worthwhile on moral grounds, even without a direct economic hit, and reject the Uzbek government’s claim that the boycott is motivated by the threat of competition from Uzbek companies and their Asian customers. With the soar in cotton prices, there are enough sales for everybody to be made.
Ultimately, what both activists and companies with a policy of corporate responsibility would like to see is that Uzbekistan cease the exploitation of children, and in good faith, permit the International Labor Organization (ILO) to enter the country – something it refuses to do to date. In that respect, the boycott has forced the Uzbek government at least to go through the motions of cooperation with the international community, and raised the visibility of its non-compliance with the ILO’s conventions and requests. This year, the Uzbek government announced that it was forming an interagency group to monitor the use of children in the cotton harvest, although nothing has been heard from the commission since its founding last summer and it is not known if it is making any inspections or recommendations.
As in past years, the Uzbek government has formally invited UNICEF, the UN Children’s Fund, to observe the harvest in some regions – a program that UNICEF has been quick to declare as not the same thing as full-fledged monitoring from the ILO. Unfortunately, UNICEF has reported that it will only share its findings with the Uzbek government itself, and with unspecified partners (presumably other UN agencies and UN member governments). The NGO community is hoping for more transparency from UNICEF, since corporations faced with the charge of complicity in the Uzbek government’s exploitation of child labor have demanded documentation and validation of the practice from an official international body other than an NGO. UNICEF has informally acknowledged that forced child labor is used, and WikiLeaks cables of UNICEF’s reports to US diplomats has provided further confirmation, yet UNICEF has evidently taken the position that in order to keep its presence in Uzbekistan for its other programs involving maternal and infant health, inoculations, and nutrition, it will not make a publicly critical report.
Meanwhile, there is more evidence than ever this season, gathered by networks of brave monitors and human rights groups inside Uzbekistan and abroad, that there are children as young as 8 and 10 in the fields, that they are working long hours to exhaustion with poor conditions, sleeping on the floor of barracks and sheds, and cooking for themselves with food brought from home. Tragically, one night a 13-year-old boy walking home from the cotton fields with his fellow students was struck by a car and severely injured and remains in a coma.
Ultimately, when there are grave human rights violations of this nature documented, the goal of a boycott is to avoid legitimizing the government enabling such wrongs.
It is also important to see how the Tashkent Cotton Fair is used by the Uzbek government to gain the legitimacy it craves in the West in particular. In an article about the fair, the government web site gov.uz claimed stunning growth of the GDP -- numbers that are difficult to check given heavy state control over information and persecution of independent journalists. The event not only serves to provide Uzbekistan with significant foreign currency infusions, it is supposed to serve as a vindication of the Soviet-like control of agriculture, where the state still demands quotas from farmers, selects what crops they will grow, pays only a fixed price for their harvest, and mobilizes some 1.5 million or more students to pick cotton, along with their teachers and other state employees.
As the cotton fair is a symbol of state power and success, the refusal of many Western companies to assist in that propagandistic exercise is important in delegitimizing tyranny. That Western opinion does count is illustrated by the great extent to which the propagandists go to ferreting out highly-publicized interviews of the few Europeans representing trade associations who did attend the fair. There is also the government’s simultaneous claims that it has no child labor problem – and that it is working on monitoring and preventing it in a government commission.
Recent documents that have come to light illustrating that NGO estimates of at least a million children mobilized in the cotton harvest if anything, may be too low. A WikiLeaks revelation of a US diplomatic cable shows that a reliable source cited to a US official the official Uzbek trade union’s number of 1.64 million students used in agricultural work. A memo sent out to provincial officials in Khorezm this season obtained by the Paris-based Association for Human Rights in Central Asia indicates that government planners assume that they will use a certain number of high-school and university students in the harvest, and then gives a figure for other workers that could indicate the number they assume are available from middle schools. According to these figures, as many as 2.5 million children could be used, an estimate that has also been made in studies of samples from some provinces by the School of Oriental and African Studies in London.
Catherine A. Fitzpatrick compiles the Uzbekistan weekly roundup for EurasiaNet. She is also editor of EurasiaNet's Choihona blog. To subscribe to Uzbekistan News Briefs, a weekly digest of international and regional press, write [email protected]
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