Out of Quarantine

Uzbek activists and their international allies had launched the Cotton Campaign in 2007. After NGOs, investors and brands met in San Francisco in 2008, brands started evincing the desire to shun Uzbek cotton based on increasing concerns and evidence over forced child labour in that country. By 2010, the call for a boycott of Uzbek cotton had become a core part of the Cotton Campaign’s strategy.

Then the fashion community did something it was not known to do often: get into a political wrangle. The New York Fashion Week in 2011 booted out the daughter of Uzbekistan’s dictator who had planned to unveil her spring fashion line at the event. The Week organisers cancelled the show of Gulnara Karimova, daughter of Uzebekistan’s then authoritarian leader Islam Karimov, after intense pressure from groups like the New York-based Human Rights Watch (HRW).

According to HRW, “Her father’s government forces up to two million Uzbek children to leave school for two months each year to pick cotton—a fabric woven throughout Karimova’s designs. Karimova maintains a jet-setter lifestyle, which includes making a pop video with Julio Iglesias and launching her fashion line Guli.”

HRW lobbied with the senior management at IMG, the event organiser, and the Fashion Week’s main sponsors, Mercedes-Benz. It followed up with a damning article “Dressed to Kill: Daughter of Murderous Dictator to Unveil Spring Line at Fashion Week” on the opening day of the event in the New York Post. The story had been pitched by the rights group.

Karimova quickly relocated her show to the Cipriani's restaurant in Manhattan, but was chased by protesters. The event was held, but the designer went missing from the 300-odd crowd.

That year, 2011, the Cotton Campaign launched its Uzbek Cotton Pledge Against Forced Labour, with 60 brands signing on in the first year. Uzbek cotton was gradually forced into oblivion.

Karimov had at that time been ruling without opposition since 1989, imprisoning dissidents and, allegedly, even boiling two opponents alive. His bloody crackdown on a rare burst of unrest in the city of Andijan in 2005 left 187 people dead, according to official figures, or many hundreds, according to rights groups. Uzbekistan was also accused of using forced child labour in its all-important cotton growing industry, one of the world's biggest. The Uzbek government kept denying, describing those accusations as "mendacious insinuations and fabrications."

The tyranny continued till Karimov's death in 2016. His successor, Shavkat Mirziyoyev, did a first in 2017: he publicly acknowledged forced labour in a speech to the UN and even pledged to address it.

Wages have been gradually increased since 2017, and the government has also introduced a differentiated pay scale. These steps led to a remarkable drop in the prevalence of forced labour. In 2020, production quotas were done away with. This procedure had been in place in that country since the 1920s under the Gosplan system of the Soviet Union. Starting from the 2020 harvest season, state regulation of cotton production, price and mandatory sales plans were abolished.

Parleys with rights groups, especially the Cotton Campaign, continued. The dark clouds slowly started dissipating. Last year’s ILO report noted: "The government is replacing the quota system with a market-based model, with the necessary safeguards in place to minimise risks of forced labour, including fair recruitment practices and adequate wages. This will most likely end the practice of deploying pickers at the very end of the harvest simply to reach targets."

Meanwhile, the 2021 ILO Third-Party Monitoring Report of the Cotton Harvest in Uzbekistan will be published on 29 March.

The cotton sector in Uzbekistan is big—big enough to have a bearing on the country's economy. However, it is not that proportionally big to tilt the scales of global cotton trade.

In 2011–12, when the boycott of Uzbek cotton began, the country's cotton production stood at 880,000 metric tonnes (MT) against a global output of 27,880,000 MT. To put things in perspective, China’s production was 7,400,000 MT and India’s 6,239,000 MT. The corresponding figures (though provisional) for 2021–22: 940,000 MT (Uzbekistan), 26,442,000 MT (global), 5,730,000 MT (China) and 6,161,000 MT (India).

Uzbekistan’s global ranking has historically varied between 6th and 8th, but in terms of volume, it hardly looks the kind that would have a significant bearing on global cotton trade.

Nevertheless, the most recent comprehensive data from that country can be found in the Cotton and Products Update of the Foreign Agriculture Service (FAS) of the US Department of Agriculture (USDA) December 2020.

The report noted: "The most important trend in the cotton sector in Uzbekistan is the effort to consume all produced cotton in the country and not export it as raw material. Domestic consumption is forecasted to be at about 2.75 million bales (600,000 MT) for MY 2020/21, considering some amount of cotton exports are expected, despite the efforts to zero cotton lint exports, and some possible COVID19 effects in the winter of 2020. According to government sources, presently about 500 enterprises are engaged in textile production in Uzbekistan. The Uzbek government is encouraging new partnerships to increase the use of cotton domestically. New textile investments are approved, and new mills are expected to start operations that will increase domestic consumption in the coming years. At the same time, existing mills are increasing their capacity as well.”

The USDA harped on an important point: that the rapid increase in domestic consumption has limited the cotton available for exports. Therefore, "in accordance with the GoU policy of cutting raw cotton exports and increasing the exports of value-added cotton products, both cotton yarn and cotton fabric exports of the country are increasing, despite the COVID19 pandemic around the globe creating an unstable market for clothing and textile products."

“Uzbekistan’s exports of cotton yarn, textiles, and ready-made garments were about US$ 1.6 billion in 2018 and are estimated to reach about US$ 2 billion at the end of 2020, somewhat less than expected by GoU, as COVID19 affected sales. GoU has targeted reaching US$ 20 billion worth of textile/ready-to-wear exports by year 2030. To increase textile exports, Uzbekistan opened a textile showroom in New York City in March 2020. GoU and Uzbek textile production companies have continued efforts to increase the familiarity and sales of Uzbek textile products in the US and EU.”

Uzbekistan has had trade relations with CIS (Commonwealth of Independent States) countries, China and Turkey, among others. This should throw up an obvious fact, that invariably goes unnoticed: Uzbekistan is a landlocked country. It does not have a port, and all freight has to be by road or over air. It is surrounded by five other landlocked countries:  Kazakhstan to the north; Kyrgyzstan to the northeast; Tajikistan to the southeast; Afghanistan to the south, Turkmenistan to the southwest.

So, Uzbek cotton gets a fresh lease of life. But the global status quo continues.