The Last Compulsory Harvest
For most of its independent history Uzbekistan brought in the cotton harvest with conscripted labour — teachers, nurses and students sent to the fields on a quota handed down from the presidency. In March 2022 the international boycott that had targeted it for well over a decade was called off, because the price mechanism that made the conscription necessary had been dismantled.
Uzbekistan picks its cotton by hand, in the autumn, over about six weeks. Machines exist and take some of the crop, but hand-picked fibre is cleaner and worth more, and for most of the country's independent history the hands belonged to people who had not volunteered. Teachers, nurses, students, tax inspectors and factory staff were sent out on a quota that came down from the presidential administration to the region, from the region to the district, and from the district to the head of a school or a hospital who was personally answerable for filling it. In a bad year the number of people mobilised ran into the millions.
On 10 March 2022 the Cotton Campaign, a coalition of unions and human-rights organisations that had spent well over a decade persuading clothing brands not to buy Uzbek cotton, called the boycott off. More than three hundred companies had signed its pledge. Boycotts usually end because they fail, or because the campaigners run out of money, or because the story moves on. This one ended because the thing it was aimed at had been dismantled, and the interesting part is what had to be dismantled to get there.
The state order
The system Uzbekistan inherited in 1991 and then kept was the state order. Tashkent told each district how many hectares of cotton to plant and how many tonnes to deliver, and the district told each farm. Farmers did not own the land — they held leases from the state — and a lease could be cancelled for missing the quota, which made the instruction binding in the only way that matters. The state was also the sole buyer, and it set the price it paid, below what the fibre was worth on the world market. The difference went into the budget. For years cotton was one of the largest single sources of hard currency the government had.
That price is the whole explanation. A farm being paid less than its crop is worth cannot pay a market wage to the tens of thousands of people needed to pick it inside the few weeks it has to be picked. So the wage was not paid and the labour was requisitioned instead, out of institutions the state already controlled. Children were used routinely into the early 2010s and schools in cotton districts simply closed for the season. The International Labour Organization began monitoring the harvest in 2013, and by the middle of that decade systematic child labour had largely gone. Adult forced labour had not, because nothing about the price had changed.
Why the boycott bit
The Uzbek Cotton Pledge asked brands and retailers to commit to not knowingly sourcing Uzbek cotton until the forced labour ended. What gave it force was not the number of signatures but a supply-chain fact: raw Uzbek fibre was shipped to spinners in Bangladesh, China and Turkey and blended into yarn there, so a European retailer could not demonstrate that a given garment was free of it. Faced with an accusation it had no way to disprove, the safe commercial answer was to exclude Uzbek cotton altogether. The boycott therefore bound companies that had never signed anything, and it removed the premium end of the market from a product already being sold below its value.
Forced labour was not a scandal attached to the cotton system. It was the item that made the arithmetic balance, and it could not end until the arithmetic did.
What changed, and when
Islam Karimov died in September 2016 after twenty-seven years in power, and his successor Shavkat Mirziyoyev moved on the harvest early. Picking rates were raised sharply and paid in cash. A 2017 decree prohibited the mobilisation of students, teachers and medical staff, and unlike earlier gestures it was enforced against officials who ignored it. The currency was floated in September 2017, ending a parallel exchange rate that had been quietly taxing every exporter in the country. The state order for cotton was abolished outright from the 2020 harvest. The ILO's monitors, by then interviewing thousands of pickers a season, reported that the 2021 harvest had been brought in without systemic forced labour, and the pledge was lifted the following March. The United States removed Uzbek cotton from its list of goods made with forced or child labour later the same year.
The clusters
What replaced the state order was the cluster: a private, vertically integrated company granted land in a district and made responsible for the whole chain — growing the cotton, ginning it, spinning it and, increasingly, weaving and sewing it. The aim was never to become a better exporter of raw fibre. It was to stop being one. Uzbekistan now processes essentially all of its cotton at home and sells yarn, fabric and finished garments instead, which is where the margin sits, and the EU tariff preferences it was granted under GSP+ in April 2021 made that shift worth real money. A country that spent thirty years shipping fibre out cheaply now ships shirts.
What it does not fix
A farmer inside a cluster's district contracts with that cluster or with nobody, which is a state monopsony replaced by a set of local ones, and the land is still leased from the state, so cancellation is still the lever. Independent trade unions still do not exist, and the campaigners who lifted the pledge kept a narrower campaign running on precisely that point. Then there is the water. Cotton in Uzbekistan is grown in a desert on river water delivered by open canal, and a picker who is paid properly uses exactly as much of it as a conscripted one did. The Amu Darya and the Syr Darya were turned onto these fields from the 1960s and the Aral Sea is what is left of the consequence: the eastern lobe dried out completely in 2014, and the trawlers at Moynaq now sit a long drive from any water at all. Ending forced labour was a real reversal, accomplished in about six years, which almost nothing in this region has been. It settled the labour question and left the hydrology precisely where it was.