Cotton and the Law in Uzbekistan, 1917 to 2020

From January 1918 to September 1919, the railway linking Tashkent to European Russia was cut. For most regions of the former empire that would have been a supply problem. For Turkestan it was a death sentence, because the fields that should have fed it were growing cotton.

The historian Marco Buttino, whose 1990 study in Central Asian Survey is still the standard reference on the collapse, estimated that at least two million people disappeared from Turkestan between 1916 and 1920. That's about 27% of a pre-war population of 7.3 million. Starvation and the diseases that follow it caused most of those deaths, not fighting. Nearly every law Uzbekistan has written about cotton since then, including the forced-labour amendments of 2020, has been a response to what the crop does to the people around it.

A region that grew what it couldn't eat

Under Tsarist rule, the Ferghana Valley became Russia's cotton belt and came to rely on grain shipped in from European Russia and Siberia. That arrangement held in peacetime. The First World War broke it.

Buttino's figures, as summarised by the Oxford historian Alexander Morrison, show how fast it went. The 1915 cotton harvest was the largest on record, but the state bought most of it at a fixed price about 50% above 1913 levels, while grain in the cotton districts doubled in price as supplies from elsewhere fell by a third. Peasants did the sensible thing and started sowing grain on cotton land. The governor-general, Aleksei Kuropatkin, tried to stop them, because cotton meant uniforms and munitions. By the end of 1917 grain available per person in Turkestan had halved from pre-war levels. Then the railway closed.

By Morrison's account, cultivated land among the settled Muslim population shrank by 39% over these years, and farming didn't recover to 1913 levels until 1928. Then collectivisation hit it again.

"White gold" and the Soviet quota

The Soviet state kept the monoculture and turned it into a plan. A 2022 ILO history of its work in Uzbekistan, written by former ILO deputy director-general Kari Tapiola, describes the Soviet harvest as centralised and often brutal: more than three million pickers a year, three passes through the fields between September and early November, adults moved from their workplaces into the rows, and schools shut so children could pick too. Picking was presented as a patriotic duty. Whether anyone could refuse was, in Tapiola's phrase, a moot point.

The quota also produced one of the great frauds of late Soviet history. In the early 1980s the Uzbek leadership reported cotton that didn't exist; the same ILO history says Moscow paid Uzbekistan over US$6 billion between 1978 and 1983 for cotton never delivered. By that account, party boss Sharaf Rashidov died in 1983 the day after Yuri Andropov let him know he had proof, and the investigation that followed swept up much of the republic's leadership before the case faded with the USSR itself.

If you want to see how the era painted itself, the Savitsky Museum in Nukus hangs official harvest canvases a few rooms away from the art the same system suppressed. Our Savitsky Museum guide covers it.

Independence kept the machine running

Collective farms were dismantled after 1991. The quota wasn't. Farmers leased state land and were told what to grow; according to the ILO account, if they missed the state production target they could lose the land. District governors, the hokims, were responsible for delivering the labour, and collective agreements in the public sector allowed staff to be sent elsewhere for 60 days, which happened to match the length of the harvest. Tapiola translates the local term for it as "obligatory volunteering".

So up to three million people a year still went to the fields for 20 to 30 days, many against their will. Uzbekistan ratified the ILO's worst-forms-of-child-labour convention in 2008, yet international pressure kept building. After a 2009 petition by activists, 331 brands and retailers eventually signed the Uzbek Cotton Pledge, promising not to knowingly source Uzbek cotton.

2017 to 2020: the law catches up

What changed things first wasn't a statute. In September 2017 President Shavkat Mirziyoyev told the UN General Assembly that Uzbekistan was working with the ILO to eradicate child and forced labour. The next day, the ILO history records, the prime minister ordered all students and medical and education staff home from the harvest. Nearly a fifth of the pickers packed their bags that morning.

The legal changes came after that.

Date	Measure	What it did
2019 harvest	Higher administrative fines	The ILO reports fines were raised tenfold and 259 officials and managers, hokims included, were fined, demoted or dismissed.
January 2020	Criminal Code amendments approved by the president	Article 148-2 made forced labour a crime, but only for repeat offences; a first offence is an administrative matter (Administrative Code Article 51). In force about three months later.
6 March 2020	Presidential decree	Abolished the state quota for growing and selling cotton, starting with the 2020 harvest.

The criminal article has a real limitation, and the US Department of Labor spelled it out in its 2020 report. An official can only be prosecuted under Article 148-2 for forced labour if they reoffend within the same 12-month period. First offences draw fines instead. Those fines got much heavier (the maximum rose from about $60–70 in 2019 to nearly $2,000 in 2020), and the ILO counted 231 officials fined a combined 1.142 billion som in 2020. Prosecutions were another story. The Ministry of Employment sent six forced-labour cases to court that year, and the DOL noted problems with evidence and witness testimony.

Our view: the quota decree mattered more than the criminal article. As long as a hokim answered for a tonnage target, the pressure to round up teachers and nurses came from the system itself, and no fine was going to outweigh it. Removing the target removed the reason.

What the monitors found

For the 2019 harvest, ILO telephone polling put the share of pickers clearly in forced labour at about 6%, some 100,000 people. For 2020, the first harvest without quotas, the ILO's third-party monitoring for the World Bank was based on more than 9,000 unaccompanied and unannounced interviews drawn from a representative sample of 1.8 million pickers. It found that more than 96% worked freely, that systematic child labour had been eradicated, and that systematic recruitment of students, teachers and medical staff had stopped. Some local coercion was still recorded.

The same report gives the harvest a human scale. One working-age Uzbek in eight picked cotton in 2020. Sixty-five percent were women, mostly rural. The average pay was 1.54 million som, then about $150, for 21 days' work, and 60% of pickers said it was their only cash income of the year.

In 2021, across 11,000 interviews, forced labour no longer showed up on any significant scale. On 10 March 2022 the Cotton Campaign ended its call for a boycott, citing a report by the Uzbek Forum for Human Rights that found no central government-imposed forced labour in the 2021 harvest. The Forum still documented coercion by local authorities and individual cases of forced labour, and the Campaign pointed out that independent monitors and trade unions still couldn't register and operate freely.

What's left of the old system

Quite a lot of the landscape. Cotton still takes a large share of the water that the Amu Darya and Syr Darya carry, which is the thread linking this story to the shrinking Aral Sea. Private textile "clusters" now run much of the crop, and critics warned when quotas ended that the cluster model could squeeze farmers in new ways.

For a visitor, autumn is when you'll notice it: white fields beside the main highways, trucks stacked with raw cotton, pickers bent over the rows. Our guide to Uzbekistan in autumn covers the season. What you're looking at now is paid seasonal work, mostly by rural women who need the money. A century after the railway closed on a starving province, that's the change the law was written to secure.

Sources

This article is for general information and is not legal advice.