Government still forcing young children to harvest cotton…

forced-child-laboruzbekistanautumn2008

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Uzbekistan update: Government still forcing young children to harvest
cotton despite pledges to ban the practice
A group of human rights defenders in Uzbekistan
International Labor Rights Forum
November 2008
This report is based on information gathered by human rights defenders within Uzbekistan in
September/October 2008. Contrary to the government of Uzbekistan’s assertions that it has
banned forced child labor, recent information suggests it continues to compel children as young
as 11 and 12 to pick cotton, closing schools and using other coercive measures to enforce
compliance. Although Uzbekistan has recently signed two ILO conventions against forced and
child labor, and issued a new decree ostensibly prohibiting the practice, information from
around the country shows that the government continues to rely on the state?orchestrated
mass mobilization of children to bring in the 2008 cotton harvest. Uzbekistan is the world’s
third largest exporter of cotton, and cotton is that country’s largest source of export revenue.
Children already in the fields for weeks
According to reports from nine of Uzbekistan’s twelve territorial units, (Jizzakh, Fergana,
Namangan, Syr Daria, Surkhandaria, Bukhara, Khorezm, Tashkent and Samarkand provinces) by
the third week of of September local governments and school administrators had already sent
children as young as the seventh grade (ages 13?14), and in some cases as young as fifth grade
(11?12) out to the fields to pick cotton. By the end of September, pressure to bring in the
harvest before rains began near the end of the month led local officials to order the smallest
schoolchildren, from first grade on, to labor on the harvest.
In Fergana, schools were closed and children were sent out from September 22, though a week
earlier those same schools forced children to sign statements that they would remain in school
over the fall semester. Journalists on the scene suggested that these statements were intended
to give local government officials plausible deniability if the children’s presence in the fields was
challenged.
In one Namangan district, journalists and human rights defenders observed children from
several schools, some as young as eleven, picking cotton. The children reported that each day
local government officials and bureaucrats from the local education department would visit the
fields to check up on the number of pupils out picking, and to make sure that harvest targets
were being met.
The Samarkand provincial government also sent its schoolchildren out to pick cotton on
September 22. Children as young as 13 were forced from their classrooms on that date, though
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high school, junior college as well as university students (ages sixteen and above) had already
been sent out to the fields for several weeks by that time, according to sources in the province.
In Jizzakh, local governments began to bus high school and junior college students, aged fifteen
and up, out to the cotton fields by mid?September. Reports from the field indicated that as in
previous seasons, and as in the rest of the country, children there were housed in unheated
barracks without access to drinking water or adequate food. In Syr Daria, a major cotton
growing region, high school and junior college students were sent out promptly on September
9.
Even children from urban areas, including the industrial town of Almalyk in Tashkent province,
are reportedly being pressed into service this year, as in years past. Almalyk schoolchildren
were sent to the cotton fields on October 1, though high school and junior college students
(grade nine and above, or ages 15?17) were already out picking since early September. In
addition to these areas, activists in Bukhara, Surkhandaria and Khorezm provinces have also
reported children picking cotton in September.
Initial reports suggest that conditions on this year’s harvest may be more abusive than in years
past. Several young people interviewed by the news website Fergana.ru have run away from
the fields where they were housed in October. The children reported that though the underripe
cotton is much harder to pick this season, their obligatory daily quotas were set at a higher
level than usual (60 kg., rather than 30?40kg), and they were beaten, by teachers, farmers and
others, for not meeting them. Farmers did not feed the children, nor was potable water
available. In all the provinces surveyed, respondents conveyed the increased desperation and
harshness in the 2008 forced labor campaign. The use of children aged seven to eleven is
unusual, even by the standards of Soviet times.
Surveys show that farmers this year are providing little if any resources to transport children to
the fields, leaving them to walk long distances on their own. Low rainfall, many observers say,
will yield a smaller harvest than usual, prompting local officials to increase the pressure on
children to pick every boll in the fields. Though children in several provinces were promised
that their labors would end by November 1, local officials’ desire to maximize the harvest totals
at whatever cost is now reportedly keeping them in the fields until November 15. In addition,
there are more and more reports of children not receiving even the minimal customary pay for
their labor.
Finally, lack of adequate protections for the health and safety and well?being of child laborers
has already led to five reported fatalities this season. Local advocates report that children have
perished from drowning in ponds and irrigation canals while trying to wash or clean dishes.
Two adolescents have died from traumas received in fights. A first grade girl was hit by a car
and died while walking to the cotton fields without any adult supervision. Most chillingly, a
teenage girl in Jizzakh province has committed suicide after being denounced by her school
administration for not meeting her daily cotton picking quota.
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Corruption has permeated the forced labor economy of cotton even more deeply in 2008.
Sources from several provinces relate that officials are demanding parents pay bribes of from
100 to 200 USD to keep their children out of the cotton fields. This, in a country where public
sector workers earn 20?30 USD per month is a ruinous sum. Teachers themselves are being
fined by the local authorities this year from two to three and a half thousand sum (1.5?3 USD)
per child for each pupil absent each day from the fields. Reports from a local human rights
association, the Rapid Reaction Group, indicate that schoolchildren who cannot fulfill their daily
picking quotas are being forced to make up the difference in cash, which teachers then pass on
to the local government representatives.
Reported government “ban” meaningless
Some news outlets have misleadingly reported that the Government of Uzbekistan has ratified
two international instruments prohibiting child labor, International Labour Organization (ILO)
Conventions 182 and 138, on the Minimum Age for Employment and Against the Worst Forms
of Child Labor. In fact, according to the ILO, while both conventions have been signed by the
Uzbek government, only Convention No. 182 has been properly deposited and it will not be
considered to be in force until one year from the date of deposit, or July 2009.
On September 12, Prime Minister Shavkat Mirziiaev issued a brief and vaguely?worded decree
instructing the government to implement a national “action plan,” purportedly developed as an
instrument to combat child labor. No further details on this action plan were made available,
and the public was not informed of this decree as it was not publicized by the local press. The
decree followed rumors of Mirziiaev’s oral instructions to governors to avoid using children in
the cotton fields.
Nevertheless, ten days later, governors in at least five provinces had issued orders to mobilize
children for the harvest. No such instructions can be given on the provincial level without
clearance from the head of government. Deputy governor of Syr Daria province, Islom
Shodmonkulov, warned that any person trying to block children’s participation in the cotton
harvest would be named “an enemy of the people.” Human rights observers estimate that
there are 5?7,000 political prisoners in Uzbekistan’s jails, convicted for “anti?constitutional
activity,” so the threat is not an idle one. None of the children in the fields, parents or teachers
interviewed across these eight provinces had heard of the governmental decree. Local human
rights organizations are aware of the existence of the plan but it has not been publicly shared.
The local state?controlled press has also kept silent about it, although at least two international
organizations, UNICEF and the International Cotton Advisory Council (ICAC) confirmed their
receipt of a draft document, apparently provided by the Government of Uzbekistan, and titled
“Resolution of the Cabinet of Ministers of the Republic of Uzbekistan.” The document stated
the intention of the GOU to approve a National Action Plan.
Despite this resolution, an offer by ILO and ICAC to undertake or facilitate an independent
technical assessment of the problem of forced child labor in the current harvest was not taken
up by the Uzbek government. Uzbekistan remains actively hostile toward efforts to gather
information about its child labor practices. In early October the government detained and
harassed an independent journalist who accompanied a US diplomat on a research trip to Syr
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Daria province, where the diplomat photographed children working in the cotton fields. .
According to the Association ‘Human Rights in Central Asia’ (based in France) one of its local
correspondents who gathered evidences of the use of child labor during the current harvest
was forced to flee the country due to the harassment and intimidation from local police.
In sum, the Government of Uzbekistan has claimed credit for ratification of the ILO conventions
prohibiting child labor but has taken no serious measures to engage or work with the ILO to
develop an action plan or even to undertake a credible assessment of the problem.
Uzbekistan, with its massive unemployment, was and is entirely able to eliminate forced child
labor. The country already has several laws on the books that would, if respected, ban
children’s forced labor on the cotton harvest. The practice clearly violates Uzbekistan’s own
longstanding statutes on the rights of children, and the labor code including its provisions on
the minimum age and conditions of children’s work. Yet despite these laws, over the past
decade, analysts conclude that the government has only intensified its reliance on forced child
labor to bring in the cotton harvest, due to a number of economic and political factors. Among
these are the persistence of elements of a command economy in the sector, and constraints on
a free labor market.
Adoption of the ILO conventions per se, therefore, is unlikely to free children from the burden
of the country’s cotton harvest unless additional steps are taken. The first of these must be a
genuine effort to reform the cotton sector in order to attract alternative labor sources to take
the place of schoolchildren in the cotton fields.
Major international brands continue to reject forced child labor cotton
Uzbekistan’s latest decrees come in an effort to repair its international image and salvage the
marketability of its major export product. Concerned retailers worldwide continue to reflect
consumer revulsion at child labor, rejecting products containing Uzbek cotton as a component.
Wal?Mart, the world’s largest retail chain, joined that group on September 30 when it banned
Uzbek cotton from its products and instructed its suppliers to comply. It joins leading
international brands such as Levi Strauss, Tesco, Target and others. Not only international
corporations but major investors and industry associations have called on Uzbekistan to halt
the forced labor of children.
Unfortunately, the cotton Uzbekistan has harvested in 2008 still carries the stain of children’s
exploitation. ILRF calls upon the Government of Uzbekistan to complete its deposit of ILO
Convention No. 138 and to respond fully to an existing complaint before the ILO Committee of
Experts on continued violations of the ILO’s forced labor conventions. ILRF requests that
concerned international stakeholders, including the ILO, ICAC, US and EU governments, and
brands and retailers of cotton products continue to use all means of pressure to convince the
Government of Uzbekistan to allow a comprehensive independent investigation of the problem
of forced child labor in the cotton sector, in consultation with the ILO, and, based on its
findings, to develop a credible and comprehensive action plan and to commit the resources to
end the problem.