In late September 2019, the Uzbek Minister for Emergencies issued a decree ordering over 2,000 firefighters to participate in Uzbekistan’s most recent cotton harvest. These firefighters were among the many thousands of people forced to pick cotton during this harvest.
According to a recent report published by the Uzbek Forum for Human Rights (UFHR), which has been monitoring harvests for over ten years, those forced to pick cotton in 2019 also included civil servants, bank employees, nurses and paramedics.
Since Uzbek President Shavkat Mirziyoyev took office in 2016, the numbers forced into the cotton fields in Uzbekistan each year have declined significantly – albeit from the staggering high of over a million people under Mirziyoyev’s predecessor Islam Karimov. The use of child labour has also been eradicated. But even according to the International Labor Organization (ILO), whose monitoring has been criticised for underestimating the extent of forced labour in the Uzbek cotton industry, over 100,000 people were forced to participate in the 2019 harvest.
