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Article

16 Mar 2016

Author:
Michael Kourabas, TriplePundit (USA)

Commentary: Forced labour continues in Uzbek & Turkmen cotton fields despite monitoring by ILO

"Forced labor continues in Uzbek, Turkmen cotton fields", 15 March 2016

Once again this year, the government of Uzbekistan forcibly mobilized its citizens — including health care workers, teachers and students — to the cotton fields to prepare for and carry out the 2015 harvest of the country’s “white gold.”...New to the harvest this year were monitoring teams deployed by the International Labor Organization (ILO). Despite finding numerous “indicators” of forced labor related to the widespread recruitment of adults, the ILO nevertheless concluded that it did not find “conclusive information that beneficiaries of World Bank projects used child or forced labor during the cotton harvest.”...[A]ccording to the Cotton Campaign and other observers, the forced labor practices of Uzbekistan are now being employed by the government in neighboring Turkmenistan as well.