Do you know where your cotton comes from?
If you knew what you are wearing, you might be ashamed. You could be wearing the product of a child slave. The truth about today’s child slave cotton picking industry is horrific.
An investigation into the industry, recently conducted by the Economic Justice Foundation (EJF) exposed a catalogue of misery. The report, compiled by on-the-spot investigators, went to visit some of the tens of thousands of small children who have been taken out of school and forced to pick cotton during the harvest months. Some of these kids go blind, so harmful are the pesticides used on the crop. 50 per cent of all deaths are from respiratory diseases linked to the amount of pesticides and fertilizer in the air.
Then there’s the environmental vandalism. The Aral Sea – the body of water that links Uzbekistan with its neighbour, Khazakstan – has almost been destroyed, its water stolen to irrigate the fields. Only 15 per cent of the inland sea remains and its 24 native species of fish are now extinct. The people who used to make their living from the sea are now economic refugees, their way of life gone forever.
That’s a hell of a price to pay for a cheap T-shirt.
This is something JAM London is not happy about. We have heard about the children partially blinded by pesticides while working in the fields; we have read about the Aral Sea, once the world’s fourth largest inland body of water being reduced to dust by the farmers’ irrigators.
DEAD ZONES – Toxic emissions from the production of cotton causes Dead Zones in the sea; areas entirely depleted of oxygen so that no living thing can exist. Dead Zones are growing in size day by day, hour by hour, minute by minute.
JAM London ensure that none of its cotton comes from a state of monopoly relying on slave labour and the forced labour of hundreds of thousands of children working in appalling conditions for little, or often no pay.
Uzbekistan is the third largest cotton exporter in the world. About one in four of all cotton garments sold in the UK contain a percentage of Uzbek cotton fibres. The first problem is that the Uzbek regime is responsible for torture, slave labour and a continuing environmental disaster on an unimaginable scale – all in the name of cotton production. The second problem is that they don’t tell you on the clothing labels in stores where the cotton fibres came from, just where the garment was manufactured. The truth about the Uzbek cotton production is horrific.
The Uzbek cotton industry is a disastrous aberration created by Soviet central planning. Over 80% of the loss of water from the Aral Sea is due to irrigation for the Uzbek cotton industry, so it is responsible for one of the World’s greatest environmental disasters. On most agricultural land in Uzbekistan, cotton has been grown as a monoculture for fifty years, with no rotation. This of course exhausts the soil and encourages pests. As a result the cotton industry employs massive quantities of pesticide and fertiliser. As a result it is not just that the Aral Sea is disappearing, but that and fertilisers, with no rotation.the whole area of the former sea suffers appalling pollution, reflected in appalling levels of disease.
Uzbek farm workers are tied to the farm. They need a propusk (visa) to move away – which they won’t get. The state farm worker normally gets two dollars a month. Their living and nutritional standards would improve greatly if, rather than grow cotton, they had a little area to grow subsistence crops.
There are no independent research institutes allowed in Uzbekistan. In fact the proportion of the population enslaved on state cotton farms is closer to 60% than 40%.
The cotton industry in Uzbekistan, Tajikistan and Turkmenistan contributes to political repression, economic stagnation, widespread poverty and environmental degradation. The economics of Central Asian cotton are simple and exploitative. Millions of the rural poor work for little or no reward growing and harvesting the crop. The considerable profits go either to the state or small elites with powerful political ties. Forced and child labour and other abuses are common.
This system is only sustainable under conditions of political repression, which can be used to mobilise workers at less than market cost. Uzbekistan and Turkmenistan are among the world’s most repressive states, with no free elections. Opposition activists and human rights defenders are subject to persecution. The lack of a free media allows many abuses to go unreported. Unelected local governments are usually complicit in abuses, since they have little or no accountability to the population. Cotton producers have an interest in continuing these corrupt and non-democratic regimes.
The industry relies on cheap labour. Schoolchildren are still regularly required to spend up to two months in the cotton fields in Uzbekistan. Despite official denials, child labour is still in use in Tajikistan and Turkmenistan. Students in all three countries must miss their classes to pick cotton. Little attention is paid to the conditions in which children and students work. Every year children fall ill. Children die..
The environmental costs of the monoculture have been devastating. The depletion of the Aral Sea is the result of intensive irrigation to fuel cotton production. The region around the sea has appalling public health and ecological problems. Even further upstream, increased salinisation and desertification of land have a major impact on the environment. Disputes over water usage cause tension among Central Asian states.
Reforming the cotton sector is not easy. Central Asian cotton is traded internationally by major European and U.S. corporations; its production is financed by Western banks, and the final product ends up in well-known clothes outlets in Western countries. But neither the international cotton trading companies nor the clothing manufacturers pay much attention to the conditions in which the cotton is produced.
The environmental costs of the monoculture have been devastating. The depletion of the Aral Sea is the result of intensive irrigation to fuel cotton production. The region around the sea has appalling public health and ecological problems. Even further upstream, increased salinisation and desertification of land have a major impact on the environment. Disputes over water usage cause tension among Central Asian states.
Central Asian cotton is traded internationally by major European and U.S. corporations; its production is financed by Western banks, and the final product ends up in well-known clothes outlets in Western countries
The cotton monoculture is more destructive to Central Asia’s future than the tons of heroin that regularly transit the region.
How are T-shirts Made?
‘The negative impacts of conventional cotton production ‘
Cotton is grown commercially using a large amount of pesticides and herbicides, toxic chemicals designed, as the name suggests, to kill pests, insects, weeds, fungus, or any other kind of living things. Most cotton is also grown on poorly managed soils, which would be almost sterile without large amounts of synthetic fertilizers. More insecticides are sprayed on cotton than on any other major crop. Many problems are associated with this production method. Severe negative impacts include: loss of biodiversity and damage to ecosystems and wildlife, depletion of precious natural resources such as water and soil, and heavy contamination of water bodies. The ecological devastation of the Aral Sea area in central Asia, one of the most visible ecological disasters on the planet, almost entirely due to cotton production, symbolises cotton’s environmental impacts.
Other impacts include poisoning (sometime fatal) of farmers, and intolerable indebtedness of poor farmers trapped on the “pesticide treadmill”. In some areas, the cost of chemicals is now reaching 60% of farmers’ production costs. The use of pesticides on small-scale cotton farms in developing countries has unacceptable negative impacts on the health of farmers and their families, and on their environment. On such farms, the level of training required to avoid hazards when using pesticides is seldom attainable. The necessary protective equipment is almost never used because of its lack of availability and its prohibitive price, and is inappropriate for use in tropical climates.
