What termed as Voluntary is proven to be Coercion.

Cotton asserts be a cornerstone of Central Asia’s rural economies. Uzbekistan is among the world’s top 10 producers, harvesting about 1.3 million tons a year, followed by Turkmenistan with around 800,000 (0.8 million) tons and Tajikistan with roughly 500,000 (0.5 million) tons.

The respective authorities in these regions have been accused of using public employees as forced labour under the threat of dismissal from their normal jobs, while students are threatened with disciplinary action or expulsion from school, according to workers and rights groups.

This issue came to public knowledge when a middle aged woman named Swetlana (name changed due to security reason) narrated her tale to a media house – that which had deplored the genuinity of the allegation.

Swetlana spends her days at the Medpunkt, a single storied rural health post where she gives injections, checks blood pressure, and visits bedridden patients in their homes. These days, the community nurse is forced to work well away from some 300 residents in her part of a village in Tajikistan’s northern Sughd region.

Instead of caring for people, she’s out picking cotton. “Last week, me and several dozen others from the public sector have spent a week in the cotton fields”, said Swetlana. “We were told to bring folding beds and slept in a makeshift dorm near the fields. We worked from early morning until sunset, with only a short break for lunch”.

Swetlana is one of thousands of health workers, teachers, and other public employees, as well as students, who have been mobilised to cotton fields across Tajikistan, Turkmenistan, and Uzbekistan this season, leaving schools, hospitals, and government offices understaffed during the harvest season, which runs from late August through November.

Those who can afford to offer bribe to the officials to get rid of the difficult manual work or depute someone else to pick cotton instead of them. In Tajikistan and Turkmenistan, those who cannot take part, are required to hire a replacement.

Rights groups say that under pressure, including international sanctions, the practice has been reduced in recent years, though as the story of Swetlana and others show, it continues. Swetlana said the cost of meals, breakfast, lunch, and dinner, are deducted from their cotton-picking pay. “So, at the end, we get a very small amount of money. It’s hard work. At 48, I’m too old for this and I have back pain. But I risk losing my job if I don’t go”.

Authorities insist that participating in the cotton harvest is voluntary. But local reports and testimonies collected by media person suggest otherwise. In Tajikistan’s southern Khatlon region, education authorities have ordered schools and colleges to send teachers and students to the fields during their free time. Two lecturers from Bokhtar State University in Khatlon told media person that they were instructed to pick cotton on weekends or risk dismissal.

In Uzbekistan, teachers, nurses, and local officials in several provinces say they were compelled to join the voluntary cotton-picking drives organised by local authorities. “All employees of our schools, teachers, guards, and administrative and technical staff, are picking cotton”, a teacher from the Olot district of the southwestern Bukhara region told media representatives. “We were ordered that if someone asks, we should say we came of our own free will”, the teacher said without revealing his identity.

President Shavkat Mirziyoev, who came to power in 2016, pledged to eradicate forced and child labour in Uzbekistan’s cotton sector as Uzbek cotton faced a boycott by Western retail groups, such as H&M, Nike, and Walmart over the use of child labour. In 2023, Mirziyoev told the UN General Assembly that the practice had been “completely eliminated”.

Yet this year, rights groups and local media report a resurgence under new labels such as voluntary participation.

On September 26th this year, President Mirziyoev declared a 10-day “emergency” campaign to prevent harvest delays. This year, Uzbekistan planted cotton on 875,000 hectares, targeting 3.7 million tons of raw cotton in 2025. With the spotlight of international scrutiny still shining on it, the government remains sensitive to criticism.

On October 14th, the Employment Ministry said more than 70 cases of labour law violations had been identified and stressed that “all forms of forced labour are strictly prohibited”.

Several local officials have been fined for coercing residents into picking cotton. Among them was a Deputy District Governor in Surkhondaryo Province, who was ordered to pay 2.6 million Uzbek soms ($1,720) in fines for reportedly insulting and threatening neighbourhood committee members who failed to send people to pick cotton.

In Turkmenistan, where the government openly supports mass labour mobilisation, the campaign is even broader. Along with farmers and civil servants, the authorities have sent soldiers, former convicts, and even alimony defaulters into the fields. Unlike previous years, many public employees are now being told to work for free. Officials justify it by saying that the public servants receive their salary from the state. A resident of the western province of Balkan told reporters.

Analysts have asserted that despite reforms and international pressure, the deep-rooted structure of the cotton economy in Central Asia still depends on coercion.

“The cotton sector in these countries remains unreformed”, said Alisher Ilkhamov, director of the UK-based research group Central Asia Due Diligence. “Mirziyoev’s reforms were political, they stopped mass mobilisation for a while, but the centralised system hasn’t changed. As long as the government sets production quotas and prices, local authorities will keep forcing people to meet targets”.

A Dushanbe-based economist, said the problem lies in the economics of cotton production. Just by sending students and state workers to the fields on the pretext of voluntary service isn’t a solution. If the government raises payments for pickers and farmers, who are underpaid because the state takes most of the profit, many people would join willingly.

Team Maverick