Government Clamps Down on Cotton Pickers

Uzbekistan’s National Security Service has been ordered to join the uniformed police in supervising the autumn cotton harvest. NBCentralAsia analysts see this as a sign that the government is tightening up controls ahead of a December presidential election.



The Fergana.ru agency reported on September 14 that the National Security Service or SNB was on hand to ensure university students and secondary school children turned out for the harvest.



A new system is in place where harvesters are organised into groups which have a policeman and someone from the prosecution service attached to them to ensure they do their work.



Students and schoolchildren have always been used as free labour for the cotton harvest, but while the police presence is nothing new, the deployment of SNB officers is.



A student from Andijan told Fergana.ru that policemen were collecting people like him and sending them off to the fields.



“They have special people with them who photograph us to ensure no one skips off work. Bogus sick-notes don’t help any more,” said the student.



Uzbekistan is the world’s second largest exporter of raw cotton, selling 1.5 million tons on the global market every year.



Popular unrest sparked mainly by spiralling consumer prices cannot be ruled out, analysts say. And Uzbekistan is due to hold a presidential election in December.



“The tightening up is obvious to see,” said one observer in the Fergana Valley. “They have no other option – they need to maintain tight control to make sure disgruntled members of the public don’t take it into their heads to interfere with one of the country’s most valuable assets.”



By contrast, NBCentralAsia analyst Shahriyor Rahimov argues that the authorities’ real aim is to prevent people going off and working in Kazakstan, where cotton pickers earn much more.



Manual pickers earn the equivalent of between five and seven US cents for every kilogram of cotton they gather, although the authorities have promised to increase this rate by 20 per cent this year. Currently, though, the rate works out at 50 to 70 dollars a ton, compared with an export price of 1,000 dollars a ton earned by the state.



The cotton crop currently covers 1.4 million hectares of land, and this year’s harvest is expected to be around one million tons.



At an international cotton and textiles conference in Tashkent last week, Uzbekistan signed export contracts for around 600,000 tons of raw cotton.



(NBCentralAsia draws comment and analysis from a broad range of political observers across the region.)