Uzbek Child Labour Laws Yet to Achieve Real Change
Cotton farms continued using children as pickers in 2009 despite official ban.
Uzbek Child Labour Laws Yet to Achieve Real Change
Cotton farms continued using children as pickers in 2009 despite official ban.
Even after the harvest was officially deemed to have finished, and the year’s target of 3.4 million tons was achieved, picking went on some provinces, in part because adverse weather this spring delayed ripening, and partly because local governors had not received orders from on high to stop.
Both in the spring sowing season and throughout the autumn harvest this year, independent media outlets, rights groups, and IWPR sources in Uzbekistan have reported that minors have once again been in the cotton fields, coerced into working for a pittance when they should have been at school. Schools were even set their own production quotas. Uzbekistan: Child Labour Continues Despite Formal Ban, NBCentralAsia 28-Sep-09) and Uzbek Children Back in the Fields, (NBCentralAsia 26-May-09).
The use of child labour is nothing new in this Central Asian state. What is different about this year, however, is that it comes a full year after the Uzbek authorities pledged that the practice had finally come to an end.
Years of ignoring the problem ended after 2007 when a number of leading clothing retailers in the West announced they were boycotting cotton sourced from Uzbekistan. In response, Uzbekistan ratified two international child protection documents in April 2008 – the Convention Concerning the Minimum Age for Admission to Employment and the Convention concerning the Prohibition and Immediate Action for the Elimination of the Worst Forms of Child Labour. The government also approved a National Action Plan to ensure the minimum age convention was implemented in practice, and in September last year, Prime Minister Shavkat Mirzioyev signed off on plans to bring these conventions into force. (For a report on the declared ban, see Uzbek Child Labour Ban Hard to Enforce, NBCentralAsia 23-Sep-08.)
At the beginning of November 2009, the Uzbek parliament passed legislation setting out tougher penalties for anyone endangering children’s health and safety by sending them out to work. (See Tougher Penalties for Child Labour in Uzbekistan, NBCentralAsia 12-Nov-09.)
The law came too late to affect the conduct of the 2009 harvest, and it remains to be seen whether it have much effect next year, since the evidence to date suggests that previous bans are ignored at the behest of the state authorities themselves.
Farmers say they have little option but to use child labour since there is not enough seasonal adult labour or harvesting machinery to go round. Meanwhile, they are under constant pressure to deliver against state-imposed targets come what may. (For a report on this issue, High Targets, Low Outputs, Say Uzbek Farmers, NBCentralAsia 26-Nov-09.)
At the annual Tashkent cotton fair held in October, Uzbekistan signed export deals totaling one million tons. With the official production figure put at 3.4 million tons, the expectation is that the remainder will be processed into textiles in local factories.
Reducing exports of raw cotton so as to boost domestic manufacturing has been part of government policy for some years, and at first sight the export data appear to confirm this is happening. As a proportion of total exports, cotton shrank from 27 per cent in 2004 to nine per cent last year. In reality though, cotton sales accounted for around one billion dollars annually throughout that period, and it was increases in other export items that changed the proportions.
The government continues to impose quotas on provinces, districts and individual farms, which although technically private are not at liberty to grow other crops which they could sell on the open market.
Government purchasing organisations buy the cotton at fixed, knock-down prices that do not reflect the export earnings received by the state. The result is that farmers cannot afford to offer seasonal workers a decent wage, and are forced to accept the children sent out from local schools by the local authorities.
