Newest Twitter Updates ||>
9.01.2005 ||> When he said go back to your cotton sack I left him dying in the dirt
Today is Uzbekistan's Independence Day. It's the day that children begin school again, and a month and a half before they have to leave school again to go to forced labor camps in order to pick cotton for little or no money. As one student put it, "I earned 500 soum (equivalent to 50 cents), but the bus back cost 750."
The reason I mention this is that Nathan wanted bloggers to do their bloggy thing in regards to cotton and a proposed embargo against cotton as a way to protest Uzbekistan's human rights abuses. I'm all for it, and I like the idea for several different reasons. I am sure that there will be plenty of posts today about how one crop systems don't work and how it will punish the elite who take the profits from forced labor. So, I will talk about it from a humanitarian position, and use the things I have seen personally to drive home the reality of the situation for the people. Because I was a teacher and it hit me very close to home, I'll start by discussing the children. In Uzbekistan, children are used for lots of tasks. They help their parents at the bazaar, they clean the school and they help out their mother anyway they can with chores. Typically, if there was something that needed to be done and it didn't require an adult, the response was to say, "get the children to do it!" I don't have a problem with kids doing chores, because I saw how responsible the majority of kids were. However, making the 11 year old peel potatoes for dinner is a completely different animal than forcing them to stand bent over for 10 hours a day picking cotton by hand and then go sleep on a cold floor in a school with no heat and no running water. Usually, they only get to eat runny soup with some chunks of sheep fat in it. And they have to pay for this pleasure. They are "paid" a certain amount for each kilogram of cotton they pick a day (10 kilograms - or 22 pounds - is the quota per day), but they are charged an equivalent amount for shelter, food and transportation to and from the farm. Which turns it into slave labor.
The farmers don't have a very good time of it either. Most of them are forced to grow cotton, and not foodstuffs that could keep them fed for the year with the food they grow and also the profits from selling that food at the bazaar. As I've said before, Uzbek produce is the best I've ever tasted. Cotton, as anyone who has ever read The Grapes of Wrath knows, kills the soil. So, since the Soviet Union, they have been planting this rather destructive crop without rotation and killing the soil that they depend on. They irrigate the crops from the Aral Sea, thereby draining it and spreading all sorts of diseases to the farmers and other innocent people who are exposed to diseases. It has spawned a tuberculosis epidemic as well as expose people to chemical agents such as anthrax. Because... they need to use the desert to grow more crops. I mean, who doesn't use the desert to grow a water-hungry crop?
In the end, an embargo might force the government to halt the way they do things, and that includes the dependence of cotton. It can do nothing but help the people.
0 snow blossoms
