Can Uzbek Cotton Shake Off Its Forced Labor Problem?

Yahoo

22-04-2025

2022 was supposed to have marked a turning point for Uzbek cotton, once synonymous with state-sanctioned slavery.
It was that March, after all, that the International Labour Organization had declared the Central Asian nation's biggest cash crop 'free' of child and forced labor. The same month, the Cotton Campaign, a coalition of retail trade associations, human rights organizations and investor groups, dropped its decade-plus-long boycott of Uzbek cotton after citing a breakthrough by the former Soviet republic to harvest cotton 'almost entirely' without coercion. And when the U.S. Department of Labor released its annual list of goods produced by child labor or forced labor in September, it no longer included Uzbek cotton.
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The 'world's largest recruitment effort,' in short, appeared to have come to a conclusion. The sixth-largest cotton producer in the world, once shunned and vilified for its systematic conscription of teachers, students, doctors, engineers and others to work as pickers—for which they were paid next to nothing—could now rejoin the global marketplace in good conscience if it continued to keep up its end of the deal.
Or, at least, so it seemed. Now, human rights advocates, including those who had praised the Uzbek government for transitioning away from a command economy, say the risk of relapse grows increasingly acute, especially with the loss of funding from the U.S. government to help working conditions measure up to international standards of freedom of association, expression and assembly.
One major sticking point is the Uzbek government itself, according to a March report from the Uzbek Forum for Human Rights, a frontline partner of the Cotton Campaign. The country's leadership, it said, has 'reneged on positive legislation' to give farmers greater autonomy by running 'unwarranted interference' that has left cotton growers unable to determine the prices they get from the privately managed 'cotton-textile clusters' that their livelihoods hinge upon, which, in turn, has affected the wages they're able to pay pickers. Then there are the contradictory policies, machinery shortages and the continued imposition of de facto production quotas that are being enforced through threats of penalty. All of this has exacerbated the risks of further exploitation.
The post-2019 rise of cotton clusters, which combine production, processing and manufacturing, hasn't helped. Citing financial duress due to volatility in the global price of cotton, these clusters have not only appealed to the government to lower the price of cotton they were contracted to pay but they have also provided growers with only partial and delayed payments, if at all, said Umida Niyazova, founder and director at the Uzbek Forum. 'And still officials are forcing farmers to sign contracts with the same clusters that haven't paid them for the past three years,' she said.
One farmer, who spoke on the condition of anonymity because of the potential risk of retaliation, said that most growers preferred it 'before'—that is, when the state, not the clusters, bought the cotton—because it meant on-time payments, farm subsidies and low-interest loans. While the government continues to exert a similar level of control, including by forcing farmers to accept lower prices through veiled threats from local authorities, this person said, it's now fallen to them to purchase fertilizer and fuel at market prices and grapple with interest rates four times higher than what they used to be.
'At least the government paid on time; it was never the case that farmers were not paid for their crops,' another grower, who also asked not to be named, said through a translator. 'When the clusters appeared, they said they were new investors in agriculture, but it turned out that these new private enterprises had no funds; they received subsidies and loans from the state and did not pay the farmers.'
The Uzbek government did not respond to a request for comment.
The outcome has been a predictable one. With farmers unable to afford competitive wages because of increasing production costs, suppressed cotton pricing and unreliable payments, voluntary pickers fled to other seasonal employment with higher returns. The limited number of machinery rentals, too, has been unable to make up for the workforce shortfall.
In the fall of 2024, 3.1 million tons of cotton were harvested instead of the planned 3.6 million tons, leaving large amounts lying in the fields. Monitors also logged isolated cases of state-sponsored forced labor induced by regional officials, known as hokims, who sometimes resorted to dragooning employees of state-owned organizations or extorting them for money to pay for replacement pickers to meet volume targets.
It was only when the National Commission on Combating Human Trafficking and Decent Labor Issues, the Ministry of Education and the Labor Inspectorate began issuing public announcements reminding officials about the prohibition of forced labor that reported cases dwindled by the end of the harvest, Niyazova said. Farmers, however, have continued to appeal to the government to engage with them on a wide range of issues, including forced crop placement that permits them to grow only cotton and grain, a lack of accountability for interfering with their contractual relationship with cotton clusters, and restrictions on their freedom of association rights to form cooperatives that would give them greater bargaining power.
'We were making progress,' said Abby McGill, senior program officer at the Solidarity Center, a Washington, D.C.-based worker rights nonprofit and Cotton Campaign founding member that was halfway into a four-year agreement—it was renewed through 2026 in December—with the Center for International Private Enterprise, the Association of Cotton-Textile Clusters of Uzbekistan and the Uzbekistan Ministry of Employment and Poverty Reduction to establish an education, incentive and grievance remedy system that would strengthen the ability of Uzbekistan's cotton supply chain workers to flag and resolve human rights violations like forced labor.
'We believe, with the Cotton Campaign, that workers are the ones who need to be verifying their working conditions, and so we were working with clusters to implement ground-level mechanisms that trained the workers up on what their rights are supposed to be,' McGill said. 'We were really starting to get some good traction on the ground and build some better compliance mechanisms and higher-road standards.'
This changed last month when the Labor Department-funded program was among $30 million of so-called 'America Last' programs that billionaire Elon Musk's cost-cutting Department of Government Efficiency decided were a waste of taxpayer money. Writing in on X on March 14, DOGE called out the initiative specifically, saying that the canceled funds included '$3M for 'transparency and accountability in Uzbekistan's cotton industry.'' As it turned out, it was just getting started. Less than two weeks later, all cooperative agreements under the Labor Department's Bureau of International Labor Affairs, amounting to $577 million, had been wiped out.
Among the things those involved in the program have struggled to square—short of the fact that the money involved is a rounding error in the federal budget—is the fact that it was trying to accomplish what the Trump administration has said is a strategic priority: reducing America's reliance on China.
Boosting Uzbekistan's reliability as a cotton source would provide Western brands with another alternative to Chinese cotton, 90 percent of which hails from Xinjiang, where Uyghurs and other Muslim minorities are living under repressive and heavily surveilled conditions. This appeared to come into focus in February, when Secretary of State Marco Rubio spoke with Uzbekistan Foreign Minister Bakhtiyor Saidov to affirm the administration's commitment to a 'more peaceful and prosperous' Central Asia through 'mutually beneficial opportunities for investment.' Rubio has since spoken to Saidov a second time, again calling for increased trade between the two nations.
'I think that it comes down to a real misunderstanding about what the project was, what it was trying to achieve,' McGill said. 'We had gained so much trust with the Uzbek government. We were giving a leg up to those well-intentioned producers who were trying to improve their international compliance standards.'
The American Apparel & Footwear Association, another member of the Cotton Campaign, agreed. The trade group, whose roster includes household names such as Adidas, H&M Group, Gap Inc. and Zara owner Inditex—many of whom had also signed a pledge publicly commiting to swerve Uzbek cotton until it was no longer produced with state-orchestrated—was among the organizations that wrote to Secretary of Labor Lori Chavez-DeRemer to urge the program's restoration.
'The ILAB Uzbek cotton project puts America first by protecting the interests of American workers and businesses,' it said. 'It ensures that American cotton and American businesses are competing on a level playing field, not competing against Uzbek cotton produced under unsafe and inhumane conditions or against unscrupulous textile and apparel companies that take advantage of that. The ILAB project also puts American workers first by making sure they are competing against workers who have similar rights and protections.'
Eliminating the initiative, on the other hand, 'sets America back' by enabling Uzbek cotton undercut U.S. cotton and U.S. farmers while 'forcing American workers to compete against forced labor and unsavory labor practices, and enabling dodgy textile and apparel companies to benefit from unfair trade practices, leading to a huge competitive advantage over U.S. businesses for one of the biggest materials used in clothes,' the AAFA added.
Last week, the Solidarity Center joined forces with Global March Against Child Labour and the American Institutes for Research to file a lawsuit in the U.S. District Court for the District of Columbia to challenge what they say is the Labor Department's 'unlawful termination' of congressionally authorized international labor rights programs administered under ILAB.
Other programs remain in play in Uzbekistan, most notably by Better Cotton, the world's largest sustainable cotton initiative, which unveiled in 2023 a Roadmap of Sustainability Developments to maintain the momentum of the government reforms by raising farmers' awareness of sustainability best practices and promoting decent working conditions for laborers. Because Better Cotton's focus is on direct farming operations within cotton clusters, the organization said that the Uzbek Forum's concerns are 'out of our scope,' though a spokesperson also acknowledged the 'need to enhance rights protections across the cotton sector.'
But Better Cotton has parried with the Uzbek Forum before. Niyazova's organization had previously accused Indorama Agro, one of Better Cotton's inaugural Uzbek partners of 'land grabbing,' union busting, unpaid wages and other human rights violations—allegations that the cotton cluster said were 'flawed, misleading and biased.' In 2023, the Uzbek Forum filed a complaint against Indorama Agro through the independent project accountability mechanism of the European Bank for Reconstruction and Development, which provided the company with $70 million in financing to modernize the country's agricultural techniques and offer 'enhanced opportunities' to the local community. Better Cotton dropped Indorama Agro soon thereafter.
Earlier this month, the Uzbek Forum, together with nearly 90 other civil society organizations, signed a joint statement calling on the EBRD, as well as the International Finance Corporation, which gave Indorama Agro a $60 million long-term loan to finance the development of its land, to take ' urgent and concrete action' to remedy what they say have been severe harms inflicted on workers.
'Indorama Agro has systematically eroded workers' rights by exploiting their vulnerability created by insecure working conditions whereby employees have been misclassified as 'service providers,' depriving some 400 workers of trade union membership and safeguards and benefits under employment law,' said the organizations, which include the Accountability Counsel, Anti-Slavery International and Global Labor Justice. 'Public monitors have documented multiple cases of workers being coerced to work without pay under the threat of non-renewal of their contracts—an indicator of forced labor.'
Both EBRD and IFC declined to comment, saying that Indorama Agro had prepaid their loans. The IFC added that while it's no longer monitoring its Indorama Agro project, it will continue to support the development of Uzbekistan's private sector through its investment and advisory work. An Indorama representative said that it remains committed to 'compliance with all legal and ethical standards in all our sourcing practices.'
Even before the Cotton Campaign lifted its freeze-out, its members had agreed that it would only be a sharp U-turn in Uzbekistan's treatment of labor rights, including curbs on freedom of association, that would attract responsible sourcing and encourage greater economic development, said Raluca Dumitrescu, Cotton Campaign coordinator at Global Labor Justice, the Washington, D.C.-headquartered worker rights organization that hosts the coalition's work in Uzbekistan and Turkmenistan.
'Decent work gives farmers and workers the tools they need to resist exploitative labor,' she said. 'And I think looking back at the last two years, we've been proven right that if these things don't come together, then we're not really looking at sustainable economic development, or not really achieving the conditions needed to encourage sourcing.'
The 330-plus brands and retailers that signed the Uzbek cotton pledge before the boycott's removal have said as much. Several of them, Dumitrescu said, have intimated to her that sourcing Uzbek cotton remains risky and that they're not quite ready to take the plunge. 'We're not ready in any way,' is how she put their overall response.
Until recently, the Cotton Campaign was batting around the idea of a pilot program, based on best practices in supply chain governance, including lessons gleaned from the worker-led Dindigul Agreement to Eliminate Gender-Based Violence and Harassment in India's Tamil Nadu, to work with a selection of brands, the Uzbek industry and the Uzbek government to place some test orders.
'But after the Indorama case, after the harvest report, and just looking more broadly at the environment with things like government interference and restrictions on human rights, freedom of association and bargaining, we're seeing that even the conditions for a pilot are not in place,' Dumitrescu said, noting that the government's imposition of cotton production targets and its helicopter control of the harvest are 'at odds with what they agreed to do to lift the ban.'
'To be able to comply with their legal requirements in their countries of import to ensure respect for labor rights across their supply chains, brands need independent monitoring and reporting on labor rights, including by workers themselves,' she added. 'They need assurances that workers can organize and bargain for better working conditions without fear of retaliation—real social dialogue—and that farmers have the ability to negotiate cotton contracts, which are then respected and enforced.'