One step forward, two steps back. That appears to be the case for authoritative regimes like Uzbekistan and Turkmenistan, where cotton sourcing has been complicated by state-sponsored forced labor and curtailments on freedom of association and freedom of speech.
An update by the Cotton Campaign’s front-line partners Turkmen.News and the Turkmen Initiative for Human Rights revealed this week, for instance, that public authorities stopped forcing teachers and doctors to pick cotton or pay for replacement pickers several weeks into the harvest in mid-September—a first in the 10 consecutive years that the organizations have monitored Turkmenistan’s field activities.
While this development is “encouraging and may open a window of opportunity for reform,” the report noted, the Turkmen government did not implement actions indicating “any deeper policy changes,” such as holding officials who employed forced labor accountable or making statements condemning the practice. Other categories of state employees, such as those working at schools, hospitals, utility organizations, public agencies and state-owned factories, likewise continued to be dragooned into service—or pressured into shelling out for stand-ins.
Then there’s the fact that the country’s cotton production still relies on the exploitation of farmers who must meet aggressive production quotas or risk getting fined or losing their land, said Farid Tukhbatullin, chairperson of the Turkmen Initiative for Human Rights. With the state setting the price of cotton, farmers can “barely cover their expenses, often ending up in debt,” he said.
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“It’s a vicious circle of exploitation,” Tukhbatullin said. “To be able to pay the state for the inputs they receive, farmers need to sell their livestock or find another way to pay, with equally dire consequences on their livelihoods. Otherwise, they accumulate more debt every year. The Turkmen government should introduce structural reforms to address forced labor, exploitation, and corruption in all aspects of the agricultural sector.”
Still, the wobble in recruitment is a “sign” that change—however minute—is possible, said Allison Gill, forced labor program director at the Global Labor Justice-International Labor Rights Forum, the Washington, D.C. nonprofit that hosts the Cotton Campaign, a multi-stakeholder initiative that seeks to eliminate state-sponsored forced labor in Central Asia. For anyone who “cares about labor rights” in Turkmenistan, including brands outside of the United States, where a Withhold Release Order against Turkmen cotton has been active since 2018, it’s also an indication not to “take their foot off the gas.”
“Pressure works,” said Gill, pointing out that the move coincides with a visit to Turkmenistan by an International Labour Organization mission, which the Turkmen government invited to monitor the harvest following the signing of a so-called roadmap for cooperation in 2023. “It’s the pressure that has gotten us to this point.”
It took a decade-plus freeze-out of cotton from Uzbekistan, after all, before local observers described a “breakthrough” in the elimination of systematic child and forced labor due to a government overhaul. This led the ILO to declare Uzbek cotton “free” of child and forced labor and the Cotton Campaign to drop its brand-led boycott in 2022. The same year, the U.S. Department of Labor struck cotton from Uzbekistan off its annual list of goods produced by child labor or forced labor.
But Uzbekistan is at risk of “backsliding,” the Cotton Campaign warned in February after the Uzbek Forum for Human Rights, another front-line partner, found a “distinct” increase in reports of coercion in interviews and across social media during the 2023 harvest. Observers also witnessed some mobilization taking place to fulfill cotton production targets—even though those targets were supposed to have been eradicated by reforms.
Independent voices are also being quashed, the organization said. Last week, Umida Niyazova, founder and director of the Uzbek Forum, was ambushed by two men she did not know outside the home of journalist and activist Sharifa Madrakhimova in the Fergana region, where she had been meeting with cotton producers. One of them accused Niyazova of “organizing information attacks against Uzbekistan” while filming her on his phone.
Concerned about her safety and that of the activists she was meeting, Niyazova immediately flew back to Berlin, where she has lived since she was imprisoned and her Uzbek citizenship revoked due to her human rights work. A few days later, one of the men posted a video on YouTube titled “How much do information attacks on Uzbekistan cost?”
Niyazova wasn’t assaulted, she said, though one of the men grabbed the door handle of the car she and Madrakhimova were leaving in to prevent it from closing. “The most disappointing thing was that I had to stop my travel,” she said.
One thing that puzzles Niyazova is how the men knew where she was. She thinks that the State Security Service, the Uzbek government’s national intelligence agency, had been keeping track of her movements and using the men to send her a message about keeping quiet. The irony, she said, is that it was her organization’s monitoring that paved the way for Uzbek cotton’s return as a sourcing consideration in the first place.
Uzbekistan’s ministry of investments and foreign trade, responding to a complaint of harassment from the Cotton Campaign, said that it had investigated the incident and that the men were only trying to interview Niyazova and that there was no intention of threatening behavior.
But Niyazova’s words just a few years ago—that the door to Uzbekistan has opened but there’s a risk that it could still “slam shut—have proven prophetic, she said. The much-vaunted reforms, Niyazova said, were done to “fix the economy.” Without liberal reform that includes independent expression and other civic freedoms, Uzbekistan remains a “strict authoritarian, repressive regime” replete with censorship and surveillance.
“I think it’s a bad signal,” Gill said of what happened to Niyazova. “I do see this as part of that larger crackdown on the shrinking of the civic space. We’ve seen a lot of restrictions on people who speak out who are perceived to be critics who, expose uncomfortable truths.” The response by the ministry, she added, was “insufficient.”
“I think everyone wants to see Uzbekistan become a place with good jobs in the textile sector, but they haven’t taken the steps to really create the conditions for transparency, for labor compliance and for the empowerment of workers and farmers to do basic things like bargain collectively, protect their rights, organize, have independent trade unions,” she said. “I think the focus on Uzbekistan has been so squarely on the elimination of state-imposed forced labor that they’ve kind of dropped the ball. We’re a little bit behind where they need to be in terms of recognizing the importance of other fundamental labor rights.”
In other words, the boycott drop shouldn’t serve as an automatic “green light” for Uzbek cotton, as Gill said a couple of years ago. Sourcing in the country depends on the conditions [where] cotton production is taking place. Compliance is also “in everybody’s interest,” she said, especially with due diligence and forced labor legislation coming down the pike in the European Union.
“I think those laws are going to make it very clear that due diligence goes beyond just forced labor,” Gill said. “So for Uzbekistan, they did eliminate state-imposed forced labor—that’s significant. But other labor rights violations [and] other human rights impacts are part of what CSDDD covers. And so for companies that need to be CSDDD-compliant, they’re going to need systems and counterparts who can monitor for other labor conditions and really resolve those issues.”
That goes double for Turkmenistan as well, though the EU forced labor regulations’s product-by-product approach, which some human rights experts have criticized, could make enforcement difficult.
“We’re going to need to look at the broader mechanisms that bring all of cotton in Turkmenistan into scope,” Gill said. “Or for Xinjiang [in China], even more so. I think we still hope that some of those regulations will help capture these nuances.”