Although Uzbekistan has effectively eliminated large-scale state-imposed forced labor in the cotton harvest, ongoing government influence over certain aspects of the country’s agricultural industry continues to generate exploitative conditions for farmers and pickers alike, the Uzbek Forum for Human Rights argued in a new report.
The report, covering the 2024 harvest season, highlighted a tapestry of interrelated problems: a shortage of cotton pickers in the last harvest, government backtracking on positive legislation, and issues stemming from the cotton cluster system. A key issue is autonomy: Who decides what is planted and where, and where it’s sold and at what price. At present, many of these decisions, which are made in open market economies by farmers and business leaders themselves, are decided by the state directly, or indirectly.
While government-set quotas were abolished in 2020, a de facto quota persists via production targets that are “based on forecast yields derived from the system of forced crop placement.” Agricultural land in Uzbekistan is owned by the state and leased to farmers; many are obligated to grow cotton or grain, even when other crops would be more profitable.
A farmer from Khorezm interviewed by Uzbek Forum argued that forced crop placement makes farmers vulnerable to abuse and exploitation. “Farmers in Khorezm prefer to produce rice, as rice production is much more profitable, but the land is allocated for cotton production only,” the report stated. “Farmers are afraid to oppose local officials and agree to take on unfavorable obligations, such as growing silkworm cocoons or agreeing to a reduction of their cotton price for fear that their fields could be destroyed or their land leases terminated.”
The pressure to deliver comes from the top down. Presidential Adviser Shukhrat Ganiev again supervised the cotton harvest, reportedly monitoring the pace of the harvest on a daily basis and receiving reports from hokims and other officials. In leaked audio recordings, Ganiev can be heard scolding hokims – the heads of regions and districts – to delver on specific production targets.
This in turn appeared to have led to at least some efforts to falsify production quotas, in a throwback to a notorious Soviet era scandal. One farmer in Fergana region’s Riston district told the Uzbek Forum that the entire district leadership was involved. “The scheme is simple,” the farmer explained. “The cotton trailer drives into the cotton receiving point, the cotton is weighed on electronic scales, registered, but not unloaded. The trailer with the cotton leaves and then re-enters the cotton point again.”
Other farmers claimed that they could pay a deputy hokim to attribute certain quantities of cotton to themselves. “I know for sure one farmer was assigned 15 tons of cotton, another farmer paid to have 18 tons of cotton assigned to him. This money is not accounted for anywhere, it goes into pockets,” a farmer from Andijan told RFE/RL’s Uzbek Service, Ozodlik.
The pressure to deliver on farmers and mid-tier officials comes in tandem with a drop in global cotton prices, and a reported failure on the part of some cotton clusters to pay farmers in a timely manner. In the 2024 harvest season, Uzbek Forum said, its monitors noted an “acute shortage of pickers” that was “caused by the inability of farmers to pay competitive wages due to rising production costs, government interference, and chronic outstanding debts of cotton clusters to farmers.”
Workers in rural areas turned to other labor options in light of relatively low pay in the cotton harvest in comparison to other agricultural jobs, Uzbek Forum said. Farmers were constrained by their own financial troubles, and local government officials in a few instances turned to coercive means to get workers to the field.
The few instances of state-imposed forced labor, reported mostly in early October, triggered a governmental response, the Uzbek Forum report noted. The National Commission on Combating Human Trafficking and Decent Labor Issues, the Ministry of Education, and the Labor Inspectorate, issued public statements on the prohibition of forced labor and a dedicated hotline for reporting labor rights violations received 283 complaints.
Of those 283 complaints, however, most (219) related to “delayed payments to cotton pickers and other issues related to payment for cotton picking.”
Uzbek Forum‘s report also highlighted two government interventions that backtracked on earlier reforms. Uzbek farmers no longer signs contracts with the state but instead settle deals with ostensibly private cotton clusters. But in 2024, Uzbek Forum said, “the state returned to the practice of setting purchase prices and, through administrative pressure, forced farmers to agree to sell their cotton at a lower price than they had contractually agreed with clusters at the beginning of the year.” In addition, the government decided in early October to raise the minimum wage for pickers, paid by farmers who complained that they hadn’t been paid as agreed by the clusters.
A presidential decree in December 2023 mandated that farmers receive 80 percent of the payment for cotton delivered within three days and the remaining 20 percent by December 31, 2024. But two months into the harvest, farmers complained publicly that they could not pay pickers because they had not been paid by the clusters, as mandated by law. In November 2024 a group of more than a dozen farmers appealed to Uzbek President Shavkat Mirziyoyev to take action to improve the industry, including allowing farmers to decide themselves what to grow and allowing them to sell independently on a free market.
There have been notable improvements in Uzbekistan under Mirziyoyev, particularly with the elimination of widespread forced labor in the cotton industry – recognized internationally when the long-running Cotton Campaign boycott was ended in 2022. But this progress, Uzbek Forum argued, could very well be undermined by a failure to address lingering problems in regard to labor rights and new issues generated by the cluster system.
In a press release that accompanied the report’s launch, Bennett Freeman, a Cotton Campaign co-founder and former U.S. Deputy Assistant Secretary of State for Democracy, Human Rights and Labor, said, “We commend the Uzbek government for taking prompt action to address reported cases of forced labor in the harvest… But to develop a sustainable industry that complies with international labor standards and brands’ requirements for sourcing, Uzbekistan must accelerate the reform process by introducing broader reforms to protect workers and farmers.”
The Uzbek Forum’s recommendations for the Uzbek government encourage Tashkent to enhance the autonomy of farmers – that is, to allow them to make decisions about what to grow, where to sell, and how to price their crops. Ultimately, if the progress made so far is to be retained, it must continue. And the next steps should focus on structural reforms accompanied by social and political reforms – particularly in regard to the freedoms of speech and association – that can cement Uzbekistan’s laudable progress into lasting change.