In 2023, Uzbekistan, for a century one of the world’s great cotton exporters, sold not a single tonne of raw cotton abroad. Every fibre was spun, knitted or sewn at home. Yet only a decade earlier, that same crop had been picked by conscripted teachers, doctors and students in the largest state-organised labour mobilisation on earth. Between those two dates lies one of the most striking transformations in recent supply chain history, and an uncomfortable lesson about who really holds the power to end forced labour. THE WORLD’S LARGEST MOBILISATION Cotton – “white gold” – has anchored Uzbekistan’s economy since Soviet planners made the republic their cotton hub. The system they built outlived them. Every autumn, the state mobilised around two million people: one in eight citizens, two-thirds of them women. Public employees, students and sometimes school children were sent to camps far from home – many of them ageing Soviet-era dormitories, with ten or 15 people to a room – and held for weeks. They would rise before dawn to meet a daily quota of 50 or 60 kilograms per person each day. During this period, hospitals ran on skeleton staff and lecture halls emptied; come autumn, signs went up reading ‘hamma paxtaga’ – ‘everyone to the cotton’. Refusal to take part was not really an option: the same state that demanded the labour controlled the jobs, the degrees and the land. The system endured because it appeared to pay; in practice it was strikingly inefficient. Pickers earned little, and the cost of their food and lodging was docked, so many went home from a season owing money rather than holding it. As the fields were stripped, the daily yield collapsed: yet the quota held workers in place long after there was little left to pick. Surveys later conducted by the International Labour Organization (ILO) found the same paradox at scale: the greater the compulsion, the lower the productivity. Forced labour was not even efficient. But with quotas set centrally and cotton bought at state prices, no-one inside the system had reason to change it. THE LIMITS OF A BOYCOTT The international response became one of the most unified corporate campaigns ever assembled. From 2007, the Cotton Campaign, a coalition of human-rights groups, trade unions, investors and business associations, pressed for change. The Uzbek Cotton Pledge it launched eventually committed 331 brands and retailers, from Nike and H&M to Zara owner Inditex, never to use Uzbek cotton. And yet, for a decade, the mobilisation continued almost untouched. Uzbekistan produced much the same cotton and exported it raw to mills in third countries, entering global supply chains under other nations’ labels. This is the pattern at the heart of my research: brands operate far from the fields, and their codes and audits rarely reach the bottom tiers of a supply chain. This is the gap researchers warn about between paperwork and practice: the codes, certificates and inspections multiply while life in the fields barely changes. The boycott imposed real costs and stripped the system of legitimacy, but exclusion alone could not transform it. CHANGE FROM WITHIN What changed Uzbekistan was a different combination: unified external pressure aimed squarely at the state, and decisively, a state that chose to act. After the death of long-serving president Islam Karimov in 2016, his successor, Shavkat Mirziyoyev, launched a sweeping reform programme – branded at home as a ‘New Uzbekistan’ – that opened the economy and, unusually for a state accused of forced labour, publicly admitted the problem. From 2017, students, teachers and medical staff were withdrawn from the fields, and the central quota and procurement system was dismantled. Pickers’ wages rose sharply and recruitment became genuinely voluntary. At market rates, rural workers wanted the jobs. Production shifted from state command to more than 140 private cotton-textile clusters, vertically integrated firms running everything 48 | 2007 Cotton Campaign founded 2010 Uzbek Cotton Pledge launched 2015 independent ILO harvest monitoring begins 2016 change of national leadership in Uzbekistan 2017 students, teachers and medics withdrawn from the harvest 331 brands and retailers signed the Uzbek Cotton Pledge boycott (Cotton Campaign) trAnsfoRming toMorrow Listen to Farmon talking about his work and experiences on the Transforming Tomorrow podcast episode Transforming Uzbekistan's Cotton Industry:
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