Forced cotton picking in Turkmenistan through state workers

Turkmenistan has long been criticized by rights defenders and international organizations for its systematic use of forced labor in the annual cotton harvest. Investigations reveal that thousands of state employees must pick 20-25 kilos of cotton daily.

These include teachers, healthcare workers, and other state employees in Turkmenistan who have been forced to pick cotton as the annual harvest season kicked off in August. Residents said that, in some regions, army soldiers are also picking cotton.

The work is backbreaking manual labor and temperatures hovering around 40 degrees Celsius create brutal working conditions, workers complained.

A state employee on request of anonymity for security reasons said he works for an energy company. He disclosed that there were representatives of the regional government in the field, checking who had come to work with him.



Cotton pickers allege that those who refuse to pick cotton have been threatened with dismissal from their jobs. The employees spoke on condition of anonymity for fear of reprisal in a country where dissension is not tolerated by the government.

Media was informed that a bribe of about $115 to $140 can spare government employees from cotton picking as hiring replacement pickers costs about $8.50 to $14 a day. Among the forced laborers are many teenagers in the fields who have been hired by state workers. In Balkan Province, a 60-year-old teacher said many of his fellow employees’ salaries are too meager to hire help.

Teachers and doctors say they don’t make $14 a day, so they mustAsia pick cotton themselves.

The government of the authoritarian Central Asian has set a goal of harvesting 1.25 million tons of cotton this year.

Turkmenistan has about 580,000 hectares of cotton fields. There were no cotton-picking machines in sight in the fields, where cotton was being harvested manually by state employees and farmers.