Blogging about Uzbekistan and a potential cotton embargo? Send a trackback to this post.
Readers, what are your thoughts? Is this a good idea? Does it stand much chance of success? Will it hurt the state enough to encourage reform? Will it harm the Uzbek people?
See the earlier post for a litte more on the issue.
This post was written by...
Nathan Hamm – author of 2991 posts on Registan.net.
Nathan is the founder and Principal Analyst for Registan, which he launched in 2003. He was a Peace Corps Volunteer in Uzbekistan 2000-2001 and received his MA in Central Asian Studies from the University of Washington in 2007. Since 2007, he has worked full-time as an analyst, consulting with private and government clients on Central Asian affairs, specializing in how socio-cultural and political factors shape risks and opportunities and how organizations can adjust their strategic and operational plans to account for these variables. More information on Registan's services can be found here, and Nathan can be contacted via Twitter or email.
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My post on the history of cotton in Uzbekistan is up now.
What drives support for this torturer?
1st september is independence day in the former Soviet republic of Uzbekistan. Had true independence ever reached this beleagured country there would be no need to write this article today. However, Islam Karimov, the current dictator of the country, seems intent on ensuring that Uzbeks are mere obstacles in the path of his greater glorification, to be suppressed and tortured at whim…
Just wanted to point out that the post I did is really, really raw and I’ll edit it tonight when I get home from work. Cheers.
Another fresh post at PitchInForUz…
Sorry, I can’t get trackback to work
Trackback also failed me. I’m not convinced that cotton sanctions passes a cost/benefit analysis — I admit I don’t know enough — but I am for publicizing the word (or, the Economist’s word, as it is) about Karimov.
If I’ve got any of this wrong, I hope someone will correct me.
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.
My trackback attempt also seems to have failed . . . my small contribution to this discussion is at:
http://www.skakagrall.com/archives/000561focus_on_uzbekistan.html
Do we know what percentage of the cotton goes to China?
Nathan– It’s my understanding of the quota system that it gets upped at several levels. The Central government gives provincial hokims quotas, but since the penalty for hokims of not meeting this is so stiff (often firing), they set much higher quotas for individual districts– and this dynamic is repeated at the district level, as district hokims plant more than is demanded of them by provincial hokims, again, so as to avoid not meeting the quota in the event of a below-average growing season. Whether this is repeated again at the shirkat (collective farm) level I do not know (I haven’t heard that it is, but would not be surprised).
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.