Spinning a line

In February 2008, Ethical Corporation Magazine invited EJF's Director Steve Trent to consider the response of major companies when told that the clothes they sell may be made using cotton handpicked by forced child labour and sold to benefit one of the world’s most repressive regimes.

Thoughts by Steve Trent.

Each year tens of thousands of children and students see their schools close for weeks on end while they are forced, by their Government, into fields to harvest Uzbekistan’s cotton.

Picking the ripe cotton buds and carrying the heavy sacks of cotton is back-breaking work, undertaken during the harvest season which begins in the heat of the Uzbek summer and can end at the onset of a freezing winter.

Children are transported by bus or truck to the fields each day but the older amongst them can spend the harvest season living in appalling barrack-style conditions in improvised farm buildings, or, ironically, in outlying school buildings.

Charged for their food, and with some resorting to drinking water out of filthy irrigation pipes, the children are left impoverished and weakened by their experiences.

Uzbekistan is the world’s third largest cotton exporter, and the brutal and repressive government of President Islam Karimov reaps the benefits: around £500 million in export earnings are made each year from this brutal trade by the Uzbek regime.

In a throwback to Soviet times, Uzbekistan’s central government issues production quotas for cotton farmers. The pressure to ‘succeed’ is overwhelming and politically charged.

Adults are largely unwilling to work for a paltry wage in the cotton fields, and so children are drafted in to make up the labour shortfall and keep those quotas - almost - on target.

Cotton production in Uzbekistan represents one of the most exploitative enterprises in the world.

Europe is a major buyer – and seller - of Uzbek cotton.