Turkmen Leader Bans Child Labour
Turkmen Leader Bans Child Labour
The authorities in Turkmenistan have ordered an end to the use of children to pick cotton, although analysts doubt the ban will come into force in time for the forthcoming harvest.
At an August 15 cabinet meeting, President Gurbanguly Berdymuhammedov said children would no longer be drafted in to help with the cotton harvest.
“This practice is finished, and it’s our job to ensure there is not one single case of child labour exploitation from now on,” he said.
The president warned school heads that they would be held accountable if their pupils were taken out of class for the harvest.
Children have worked the cotton fields of Turkmenistan ever since the country was part of the Soviet Union. At that time, the country was gathering 700,000 or 800,000 tons of cotton a year with the help of this cheap labour force, made up of students and schoolchildren.
Turkmenistan is Central Asia’s second-largest producer of cotton, and the crop is an important export earner along with natural gas. Turkmen cotton sells for over 2,000 US dollars a ton on the Liverpool Cotton Exchange.
Turkmenistan ratified United Nations Convention on the Rights of the Child long ago, and its parliament passed laws in 2002 and 2005 banning the employment of under-sixteens and protecting children from economic exploitation.
Nevertheless, child labour is still being used both in agriculture and in the service sector.
“The authorities have been ignoring the Convention and their own laws for all these years,” said one NBCentralAsia observer.
The peak times when schoolchildren go out to the field are towards the end of the school year in early summer, when they help with weeding, and early September, when they go to harvest the crop, which can take 30 days.
However, this is not the only area where 12 to 16 year-olds work alongside adults.
A departmental head at a school in the northern Dashoguz region said schoolchildren were also involved in fattening up the silkworms used for silk production.
“All the pupils are released from classes and sent along with their teachers to gather mulberry branches,” she said.
The silkworms live off mulberry leaves.
In addition, local observers say large numbers of minors from poor families work at Turkmen markets, carrying heavy sacks and doing other unskilled work at all hours and in all weather.
Bahram, who is in the ninth grade at school, is one of these market workers in the Lebap region of eastern Turkmenistan.
“I clean fresh fish at the city market all the time, while my 13-year-old brother pushes a barrow carrying customer’s purchases,” he said.
Barham often misses school because of the work. He earns just four or five US dollars a day, but he is better off than his classmates who get paid nothing at all for working in the cotton fields.
According to NBCentralAsia commentators, many Turkmen adults are concerned about the presidential ban on child labour, as they are reluctant to lose out on the additional income earned by their children.
Farmers are particularly unhappy as they have long relied on child labour.
A tenant farmer from Boldumsaz district in northern Turkmenistan said he would ignore the order and carry on using minors, as he cannot get by without this additional labour pool.
Another farmer said he saw nothing wrong even when small children work in the fields four to six hours a day in hot weather.
The authorities may have to take more sophisticated measures to enforce the ban, given the lack of public understanding of the need to end compulsory child labour. There are economic issues to be addressed – the underlying reason why families send their children out to work.
Human right activists propose a number of measures including imposing tougher sanctions on officials at all levels for allowing the practice, and public awareness.
“There’s a need for educational, explanatory work to persuade the public to reject child labour as an appalling form of exploitation”, said an activist in the capital Ashgabat.
This will of course take time.
Tadjigul Begmedova, who heads the Bulgaria-based Turkmen Helsinki Fund, believes that despite the president’s orders, it is unrealistic to expect the scale of child labour to decrease, and the practice is likely to persist in the countryside.
“Right now it’s impossible to imagine they will stop using child labour,” she said.
The hard fact is that hand-picked cotton makes for a better product, and small hands are well suited to picking fine cotton from the plant.
(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 only Uzbekistan and Turkmenistan for the moment.)
At an August 15 cabinet meeting, President Gurbanguly Berdymuhammedov said children would no longer be drafted in to help with the cotton harvest.
“This practice is finished, and it’s our job to ensure there is not one single case of child labour exploitation from now on,” he said.
The president warned school heads that they would be held accountable if their pupils were taken out of class for the harvest.
Children have worked the cotton fields of Turkmenistan ever since the country was part of the Soviet Union. At that time, the country was gathering 700,000 or 800,000 tons of cotton a year with the help of this cheap labour force, made up of students and schoolchildren.
Turkmenistan is Central Asia’s second-largest producer of cotton, and the crop is an important export earner along with natural gas. Turkmen cotton sells for over 2,000 US dollars a ton on the Liverpool Cotton Exchange.
Turkmenistan ratified United Nations Convention on the Rights of the Child long ago, and its parliament passed laws in 2002 and 2005 banning the employment of under-sixteens and protecting children from economic exploitation.
Nevertheless, child labour is still being used both in agriculture and in the service sector.
“The authorities have been ignoring the Convention and their own laws for all these years,” said one NBCentralAsia observer.
The peak times when schoolchildren go out to the field are towards the end of the school year in early summer, when they help with weeding, and early September, when they go to harvest the crop, which can take 30 days.
However, this is not the only area where 12 to 16 year-olds work alongside adults.
A departmental head at a school in the northern Dashoguz region said schoolchildren were also involved in fattening up the silkworms used for silk production.
“All the pupils are released from classes and sent along with their teachers to gather mulberry branches,” she said.
The silkworms live off mulberry leaves.
In addition, local observers say large numbers of minors from poor families work at Turkmen markets, carrying heavy sacks and doing other unskilled work at all hours and in all weather.
Bahram, who is in the ninth grade at school, is one of these market workers in the Lebap region of eastern Turkmenistan.
“I clean fresh fish at the city market all the time, while my 13-year-old brother pushes a barrow carrying customer’s purchases,” he said.
Barham often misses school because of the work. He earns just four or five US dollars a day, but he is better off than his classmates who get paid nothing at all for working in the cotton fields.
According to NBCentralAsia commentators, many Turkmen adults are concerned about the presidential ban on child labour, as they are reluctant to lose out on the additional income earned by their children.
Farmers are particularly unhappy as they have long relied on child labour.
A tenant farmer from Boldumsaz district in northern Turkmenistan said he would ignore the order and carry on using minors, as he cannot get by without this additional labour pool.
Another farmer said he saw nothing wrong even when small children work in the fields four to six hours a day in hot weather.
The authorities may have to take more sophisticated measures to enforce the ban, given the lack of public understanding of the need to end compulsory child labour. There are economic issues to be addressed – the underlying reason why families send their children out to work.
Human right activists propose a number of measures including imposing tougher sanctions on officials at all levels for allowing the practice, and public awareness.
“There’s a need for educational, explanatory work to persuade the public to reject child labour as an appalling form of exploitation”, said an activist in the capital Ashgabat.
This will of course take time.
Tadjigul Begmedova, who heads the Bulgaria-based Turkmen Helsinki Fund, believes that despite the president’s orders, it is unrealistic to expect the scale of child labour to decrease, and the practice is likely to persist in the countryside.
“Right now it’s impossible to imagine they will stop using child labour,” she said.
The hard fact is that hand-picked cotton makes for a better product, and small hands are well suited to picking fine cotton from the plant.
(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 only Uzbekistan and Turkmenistan for the moment.)
