Under a blazing sun at the beginning of September, in the Samarkand region, this 16,000 hectare field of yellow flowers gave birth to a multitude of small white balls of cotton, ready to be picked from the hollows of their pods. A million hectares of cotton fields cover the territory of Uzbekistan, for which the end of summer is always a crucial deadline: the State produces its 1.3 million tonnes of cotton annually there, placing it at the eighth place among the largest producers of this textile fiber, or 3% of world production.
Suffice to say that we don’t joke with “white gold” in this Central Asian country – an ear of cotton also appears on the national emblem. On it rests the entire textile industry, employing 570,000 people out of a population of nearly 40 million inhabitants through 6,000 national companies, and 9% of GDP in 2023. But it is also the legacy of the dark communist past of this former Soviet republic.
From boycott to “comeback” on the international scene
Under the USSR, the satellite state was designated the cotton production center of the communist empire. To intensify yields, a collectivized system was put in place, and maintained during the quarter century of Islam Karimov’s presidency, after the country’s independence in 1991. Until a decade ago, millions of Uzbeks , including children, were reduced to slavery to pick the little white balls, while farmers were forced to grow cotton under penalty of confiscation of their land. In 2010, the international community imposed a boycott of the country’s textile exports.
The demons of the powerful Uzbek cotton machine today seem to belong to ancient history. In Samarkand, the historic city of the Silk Roads, the prestigious annual conference of the International Textile Manufacturers Federation (ITMF) was held, a congress which brings together each year the biggest global players in the sector. “2024 marks a real ‘comeback’ for Uzbek cotton”, estimates a European interlocutor present at the forum. A confirmation of the rehabilitation of Uzbekistan after the concerted work of the government and NGOs to eradicate forced labor in the fields followed by the lifting of the boycott in 2022.
Cotton, symbol of forced liberalization
In front of an audience of journalists and international investors generously invited to Samarkand, the Minister of the Economy and industrialists welcomed the improvement in working conditions in the sector. But also the results of the significant restructuring of the Uzbek textile industry, thanks to the liberal reforms implemented in all sectors of the economy when Uzbek President Chavkat Mirzioïev came to power in 2016, after decades of autarky economical of its predecessor. In the cotton sector, this shock resulted in the privatization of fields in 2017, then divided into 146 “clusters” and managed by local entrepreneurs. A system “unique in the world”, according to Karim Shafei, an independent Swiss observer who has studied changes in the country’s industry. It is based on “the supervision of all stages before exporting the fiber, from picking in the fields to processing and manufacturing of finished textile products in factories”.
Zafar Hakberdiev, owner of the Kamalak cluster, near Samarkand, is one of more than a hundred “little princes of cotton” across the country. Through its “cluster” of companies, the cotton bales are directly transported around ten kilometers from the fields, after picking. There, noisy rotating machines transform them into yarn, which will be used to make t-shirts, shirts, household linens and rugs for stores in the region, or for export to 58 countries. “The locations are to be rented for twenty-five years, and are allocated according to the rules of free competition,” explains the businessman, who says he generates a comfortable income of 20 million dollars per year.
This new economic organization of the fields is not to everyone’s taste. “The cluster system is in fact the same system of collective coercion,” writes independent economist Yuliy Youssoupov, director of the Center for Economic Development, based in Tashkent. “Today, instead of handing over cotton to the State, it goes to a private company, scathes the expert. Only, everything else is the same: civil servants decide on the land on which cotton will be grown, set targets and prices, strictly ensure that farmers do not plant carrots on cotton crops… As under the regime of grandfather Stalin.” For similar criticisms of the silk industry in Uzbekistan, Yuliy Youssoupov was prosecuted, then cleared.
Need for foreign investment and diversification
For the heads of the clusters, no matter: the revolution in the textile industry has breathed an air of economic freedom into this sector, at least in appearance. And helps support the Uzbek candidacy for the World Trade Organization. Especially since Uzbekistan has moved up a gear with value-added exports of finished textile products, and no longer depends on exports of raw cotton, banned by the president in 2022. The result: in five years, exports of textile products jumped 206%, while the number of factories quintupled, and the sector attracted two billion dollars in foreign investment in three years – encouraged by the creation of zones special economies, which offer tax breaks and other benefits.
“International investors are treated in the same way as locals, there are no barriers,” assures Tadjiev Mukhiddinovich, president of the cotton textile cluster association. For now, they are mainly Korean and Indonesian. “Uzbekistan has the potential to be a game-changer in the global textile industry and value chain,” enthuses Karim Shafei, citing competitive labor costs, renowned good quality products, favorable investment climate, and export subsidies. But penalized by the lack of connectivity to Europe, and above all a persistent bad reputation of Uzbek cotton, textile exports remain mainly oriented towards neighboring countries, at 85%. In 2022, they represented only a small 0.35% of global exports.
“The country is starting from zero, which allows us to seize great opportunities,” says Cem Altan, president of the International Apparel Federation (IAF), optimistically. “And in particular those of complying with environmental standards and sustainable trade “. A major challenge for this country which must save its water, whose cotton cultivation is more than greedy. Already, the level of the Syr Darya and Amu Darya rivers is decreasing from year to year due to the severe drought hitting Central Asia. In the northwest of the country, the infamous Aral Sea, 90% dry due to intensive cotton cultivation during the Soviet era, should be an example not to be followed. But the question is brushed aside by the players in the sector, who prefer to count, by 2026, on the tripling of the volume of textile exports. On condition that the Uzbek fields keep up.
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