It would be interesting to know whether pilfering / smuggling by individual farmers is more of a problem, or if local governments do this in a more organized fashion and on a wider scale.

For what it’s worth, I have also heard (and I stress that this is on the level of rumor) that ijara cotton farmers (the “sharecroppers”) will often plant something else in the middle of cotton fields (so it is invisible from the road), such as tomatoes, etc., and sell that.

An embargo would certainly be annoying for the Uzbek government and would undoubtedly call attention to its human rights abuses and contempt for its own citizens, but its hard to imagine that Russia, China, or even India would refuse to purchase Uzbek cotton. Nor would an embargo affect the cotton monoculture even if it did tangibly hurt the government– cotton won’t rot in the fields like tomatoes or strawberries– it can be stored for long periods of time in warehouses– i.e. it is ideally suited for expropriation by a slow-working, heavy-handed bureaucracy.

http://www.skakagrall.com/archives/000561focus_on_uzbekistan.html

Do we know what percentage of the cotton goes to China?

One of your concerns–the loss of money paid to farmers–may be something to not be too worried about. As I understand it, the Uzbek system (I’m pretty sure that Kazakhstan’s cotton industry is structured differently and has much less state interference.) requires that farmers lease land from the state to grow cotton. Then the state requires that all farmers sell a quota to the state below market prices. Whatever’s left can be sold at market rates.

But for a lot of reasons (the soil being degraded from years of cotton monoculture not the least of them) there’s no way quotas will even be met. Fantastical estimates of cotton harvests go back quite a long time as this wonderful joke indicates:

An official asks an Uzbek collective farm boss about the year’s cotton harvest:
Official: “Comrade, how is this year’s harvest?”
Farmer: “The cotton piles up above the ankles of Allah!”
Official: “But comrade, there is no God in the Soviet Union!”
Farme: “That’s good, because there’s no cotton either!”

It’s not much of an exaggeration to say that Uzbek cotton farmers are serfs. They don’t own their land and their labor benefits the lord of the plantations.

It’s no wonder cotton smuggling has been such a problem.

Sorry, I can’t get trackback to work

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