Is Uzbekistan Ready for its Cotton Close-Up?
After a decade-plus freeze-out, Uzbekistan is not only back on the cotton-sourcing map but it also has some of the industry’s biggest names supporting its return.
Earlier this month, Better Cotton unveiled its so-called Roadmap of Sustainability Developments, which it devised with the Central Asian nation’s key stakeholders to maintain the momentum of extensive government-led reforms—the same ones that led both the International Labour Organization and the Cotton Campaign to declare a breakthrough in the elimination of systematic child and forced labor in 2022.
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Because Uzbekistan is the world’s sixth-largest cotton grower, operations there are “intrinsic” to Better Cotton’s goals of “mainstreaming” more sustainable cotton production. The program’s goals are to build effective management systems, raise farmers’ awareness of sustainability best practices and promote decent working conditions for laborers.
“Better Cotton sees its work in Uzbekistan as an opportunity to create value and drive improvements for the environment, producers, and workers in the country’s cotton sector, and to bring us closer to our vision of a world where all cotton is more sustainable,” said Rachel Beckett, senior program manager at the Geneva- and London-headquartered organization.
Shortly after, the International Labour Organization (ILO) and the World Bank’s International Finance Corporation (IFC) touted a new Better Work program designed to uplift working conditions and boost competitiveness in Uzbekistan’s textile and garment sector. For the next two years, they said, Better Work will serve as an “industry convener,” collaborating with the country’s tripartite constituents—meaning government, employers and workers’ organizations—to monitor and improve labor standards through compliance assessments, training and advisory services.
“The program will support the sustainable growth of textile and garment manufacturing, which has the potential to create thousands of new, decent jobs for mostly women garment workers in rural areas across the country,” said Conor Boyle, officer-in-charge at Better Work.
The European Bank for Reconstruction and Development (EBRD) is supplying the program’s initial funding.
The international financial institution has poured money into dozens of projects in Uzbekistan before, including $60 million into an IFC-backed pilot program for growing cotton in Uzbekistan based on the Better Cotton approach. Indorama Agro, the agricultural enterprise it featured, has attracted scrutiny by civil society groups, which accuse it of “land grabbing” and other human rights violations. Indorama, which remains a Better Cotton partner, has vehemently denied the allegations.
The IFC, too, is a longstanding investor in Uzbekistan, with contributions going back to 2016. The ILO has been monitoring the cotton harvest in Uzbekistan under an agreement with the World Bank since 2015, when it estimated that one in eight people of working age in Uzbekistan participated in what it dubbed the “world’s largest recruitment effort.” Seven years later, the agency concluded that reforms had progressed to the point that the cotton sector was now “free” of child and forced labor.
But Allison Gill, forced labor program director at the Global Labor Justice-International Labor Rights Forum, the Washington, D.C. nonprofit that coordinates and hosts the Cotton Campaign, told Sourcing Journal that the most important thing that Uzbek authorities can do to open its textile industry to new markets is to allow freedom of association and “real” organizing and bargaining rights for workers.
The Cotton Campaign, whose members include the American Apparel & Footwear Association, Anti-Slavery International and Human Rights Watch, recently urged German businesses, consultancies and multi-stakeholder groups to jettison ties with Turkmenistan’s textile industry to avoid profiting from the same state-sanctioned forced labor that was endemic in its Uzbek neighbor.
“The German co-hosts of this Investment Forum have failed to conduct even the most basic human rights due diligence in their selection of partners,” Raluca Dumitrescu, coordinator of the Cotton Campaign, said of an event in Düsseldorf that promoted German investments in Turkmenistan earlier this month. “Encouraging sourcing of textiles from Turkmenistan, as long as Turkmen cotton continues to be produced with state-imposed forced labor, defies national laws governing human rights due diligence and supply chains that bind global brands and retailers, including the Supply Chain Act in Germany.”
Gill noted that Uzbekistan, while much changed from 12 years ago, still harbors key risks. These include the lack of independent and credible monitoring, grievance and remedy mechanisms for workers; major restrictions on association, expression and assembly; and a dearth of independent trade unions.
Tackling these will help create an “enabling environment in which labor rights can be monitored and reported on by workers themselves and improved through collective bargaining,” Gill said. “This is good for workers and good for business; it ensures rights are respected and allows problems to be resolved so business can flow without interruption.”
International developmental and financial organizations have a role to play, too, she said.
“The most important thing development banks and donor agencies can do to support the industry is to make real investments in freedom of association and other fundamental labor rights,” Gill said. “There really is no substitute. Brands looking to source from Uzbekistan need real guarantees that labor rights in their specific supply chains are respected.”
Better Cotton and Better Work’s initiatives are separate programs, though they plan to partner with the same pool of vertically integrated cotton “clusters” to ensure social and environmental compliance across the entire value chain. There are roughly 130 clusters, according to a panel at the Global Fashion Summit in Copenhagen last week.
“In practice, it means that in the same cluster, Better Cotton will cover the cotton production part to support cotton farmers to adopt more sustainable production practices including social and labor aspects in line with our [Better Cotton] standard,” a Better Cotton spokesperson said. “On the yarn and fabric production as well as processing stages, Better Work will focus on improving labor standards.”
Even so, Gill said guaranteeing human rights remains a challenge where independent human and labor rights organizations aren’t allowed to register and freedom of speech is under attack. She said that the only democratically elected union in the country, which is operating at Indorama, has been “crushed with impunity” by both the company and the authorities.
“Programs like Better Work have a role to play in capacity building and promoting labor standards, but are no substitute for the fundamental labor rights that are vital not only for workers but also to give brands confidence,” Gill added.
