Uzbek Cotton Farmers Face Prosecution

Farmers in Uzbekistan are being threatened with legal action for failing to deliver enough cotton to the state.



Since the beginning of October, local officials including justice ministry representatives have sent formal letters to farmers warning they will land in court if they do not meet the delivery targets set for them by October 21.



Farmers who received such letters started to panic.



“I was scared by the threat of criminal action,” said a farmer from the Gijuvan district of the western region of Bukhara. “That wasn’t mentioned in the contract we signed with the cotton ginnery.”



He recalled that in November 2006, the Bukhara cotton ginnery brought legal actions against about 100 farmers, who were fined for failing to implement the cotton plan. Similar action was taken against 279 farmers in the Fergana region of eastern Uzbekistan.



“Let them do what they want,” said a farmer in Bukhara. “I think the warning was designed to scare us. But if the cotton doesn’t grow, how can I fulfill the plan?”



Farmers say this year’s harvest will be smaller than anticipated, and of lower quality too, because irrigation water has been in short supply.



Despite this change in conditions, the state has stuck to the initial quotas it set the farmers. This averages 2.5 or three tons of raw cotton per hectare, but the thin harvest may mean that only 70 or 80 per cent of that target is achieved.



NBCentralAsia experts say this unreasonable approach to agriculture is the result of applying the rigid Soviet model of economic planning to a new system some describe as “state capitalism”.



Even though farmers are now private operators and have rights laid down in law, the sector does not operate according to the laws of the free market. In effect, farmers remain enslaved by the state’s right to determine the scale of production, and have no right to sell their produce independently.



Legal experts say confusion about current legislation and failings in the court system mean that local officials interpret directives as if they carry the force of laws. Hence the latest set of letters warning that failure to “fulfill the plan” will result in prosecution.



Under Uzbek law, farmers are free to choose what they want to grow and what price they want to charge for it. But the law is contradicted by a government directive setting out the terms by which farmers lease their land, which forbids them from reducing their output.



“In the theory, farms are totally independent private enterprises, but in practice they are accountable to the state for ensuring the ‘state order’ is fulfilled,” said Shuhrat Ghaniev, a human rights activist in Bukhara. “That’s nonsense.”



A justice ministry official told NBCentralAsia that farmers can be deprived of their 50-year leasehold if they do not fulfill the plan.



However, farmers say it is not that easy to give land back to the state.



“If a farmer wants to hand land back, the local authorities take it upon themselves to require him to find someone else to take on the lease. But it’s hard to find anyone to do that, since everybody knows that they’ll have problems getting irrigation water and they’ll find it impossible to fulfill the cotton plan,” said one cotton farmer.



(NBCentralAsia is an IWPR-funded project to create a multilingual news analysis and comment service for Central Asia, drawing on the expertise of a broad range of political observers across the region. The project ran from August 2006 to September 2007, covering all five regional states. With new funding, the service is resuming, covering Uzbekistan and Turkmenistan.)