…of saving Uzbek children from cotton slavery.

Uznews.net – Conscientious consumption which means the rejection of things the production of which involves violations of human rights and environmental pollution is the only way of saving Uzbek children from cotton slavery. This is a conclusion drawn by a meeting on the immoral side of fashion in Dusseldorf.

The Uzbek cotton industry, which enslaves a third of the country’s 28 million people regardless of their age and desire to be part of it, has become the worst example of the exploitation of human and natural resources in the world in pursuit of profits.

No other country has a situation which is worse than in Uzbekistan, participants in the Dusseldorf meeting on 3 December concluded.

The problem is that the government of Uzbekistan, which is the world’s fifth largest producer and third biggest exporter of cotton, believes that the people and the riches of the country are its property, Galima Bukharbaeva, Editor-in-Chief of Uznews.net, said at the meeting.

On top of running the country illegally, the country’s President Islam Karimov, his family and entourage manage Uzbekistan’s human and natural resources as they wish.

The income Karimov and his family receive from misappropriating the country’s wealth can be judged by the luxurious lives his two daughters – Gulnara and Lola – lead and by their ability to hire many Western show business and sport stars for their events.

“Who pays their bills?” the journalist asked. “The whole country.”

The cotton industry has destroyed the Aral Sea, drying up 1.4 million of its seabed, and the country’s farmland which is polluted by wrecking doses of chemical fertilisers every year. The Uzbek cotton industry consumes 56% of the region’s water resources, 60% of which does not even reach cotton fields because of the poor irrigation system. This is the price the environment of Uzbekistan and Central Asia pays for Uzbek cotton.

Moreover, about 3 million children and 6 million adults, who cannot even make ends meet, work in fields to raise $1bn in cotton sales for the country’s rulers.

Children cannot even refuse to work in cotton fields twice a year – in spring weeding fields and in autumn

Ethical fashion designers; photo: EJF

picking cotton – because the government uses police to force them to do this.

Farmers face violence from officials and police, and they do not even think of making profit from growing cotton – they do it for the government’s permission to grow other crops along with cotton to feed themselves, Bukharbaeva told the German public.

Despite all this, Germany remains a regular client that buys Uzbek cotton. It did so even after the mass killings in Andijan in May 2005 when Tashkent suspended trade with European firms, fearing the freeze of its accounts in European banks.

Uzbekistan supplies about 10,000 tonnes of cotton to Germany and is its third largest supplier after the USA and Israel.

The only way of helping Uzbek children and farmers is the refusal to use cotton until violations of human rights and environmental pollution stops in Uzbekistan, Bukharbaeva suggested.

The journalist said that people could not rise up against the regime because it would use force as it did in Andijan on 13 May 2005; they cannot rely on Western governments’ assistance either because the West needs Karimov’s dictatorial regime in its war in Afghanistan.

However, citizens of European countries and the USA, who are the main consumers of textile in the world, can and have the opportunity to influence the situation in Uzbekistan by refusing to buy clothes made of Uzbek cotton.

The German company C&A and some other European and American firms rejected to use Uzbek cotton in 2008 because of child labour used in the Uzbek cotton industry.

President of the Welthungerhilfe charity Barbel Dieckmann said that her organisation helped farmers in Africa grow organic cotton and educate their children. She admitted that the situation in Africa was different from the situation in Uzbekistan: children work in Africa because of extreme poverty, whereas in Uzbekistan they are forced by their teachers and police.

Bukharbaeva

Gulnara and a friend from Chopard

noted that models of encouraging farmers to grow organic cotton applied in Africa would not work in Uzbekistan because Uzbek farmers could not sell their cotton directly to foreign consumers.

Dr Kirsten Brodde, an environmentalist and an author, called for a campaign to urge producers to accompany their products with information that child labour was not used or environment was not polluted in the production of their goods.

Another problem, participants noted, is the fact that people in the West consume more than they need.

For example, a participant from the Netherlands said that storehouses in his country had amassed second-hand clothes that were four times the country’s annual consumption. He said that huge resources were needed to recycle them, let alone resources used to produce them.

People in Britain are concerned about rights of poultry sold in their shops now: they think that the lives of chickens must have been very miserable if they cost so cheap.

This shows that rights of Uzbek children should also become a topic for discussion in Britain and other countries and people should be aware about forced child labour in the Uzbek cotton industry, so that they ask themselves whether their pyjamas are the reason for Uzbek children to freeze in cotton fields instead of studying in schools and farmers to work for nothing.