Tajik Cotton Harvest in the Balance

In a desperate bid to produce foreign currency revenue, Tajikistan appears to be reverting more and more to Soviet-style tactics to ensure the cotton harvest is brought in.

This autumn, as always, schools and other state institutions have been emptied as students and public servants are conscripted as labour on the cotton plantations.

What sets this year apart, though, is the level of government pressure to recruit more workers, and the tough measures taken by local authorities to make this happen, such as closing down shops and markets.

Cotton production is no longer managed only by the big Soviet-era collective farms, but largely by private farmers who lease land from the state. Yet such is the importance of the crop to the treasury that observers note an uncanny resemblance to the old central planning system, where the authorities first decreed how much was to be produced and then drafted in extra labour to make sure the target was fulfilled.

On September 22, President Imomali Rahmonov telephoned the governors of several southern regions, where the flatter land is conducive to cotton growing, to express concern at the slow pace of harvesting.

By the time the president acted, most schools and universities in cotton-rich areas had already closed their doors and dispatched their students to the fields. Although Rahmonov said young people should only go to work after the end of each day’s classes, many have had no education since the academic term started at the beginning of September.

The dean of Khujand state university in the northern Soghd province, Tolib Khabilov, announced that his staff had decided the “mobilisation” of students should continue for two months.

Whatever university lecturers and students may think, they have little option but to comply with instructions issued by local government officials. Those involved allege that those who agree to join the cotton harvest are promised extra help to pass exams, while anyone who disagrees may be asked to pay a forfeit, or even threatened with expulsion.

“My son refused to go and harvest cotton,” said the mother of one student at Khujand university, who wished to remain anonymous. “The dean of the faculty said that he should pay 50 soms [17 US dollars] to buy food for his fellow students who had agreed to go and work in the fields.”

Despite the influx of young people, the authorities are clearly concerned that there still is a shortage of labour.

With hundreds of thousands of men away in Russia as migrant labour, women have become the major labour force on cotton plantations, according to the United Nations Development Programme. The harvesting machines used in the Soviet period have fallen into disrepair and harvesting is done almost entirely by hand. And the meagre sums offered to cotton pickers – the equivalent of six US cents per kilogram of cotton – are not enough to attract casual labour even in this impoverished society, so a certain amount of coercion has to be used.

Local government officials took the president’s call literally. Authorities in the Vose district in southern Tajikistan ordered markets, shops and kiosks to remain shut between the hours of nine and five. The idea was clearly to remove alternative activities for shoppers and traders alike. Now only one local market remains open during the working day, and as a result prices of basic foodstuffs have rocketed.

Coming at the start of the Ramadan month of fasting, these measures have angered local residents.

“I can’t understand why we are forbidden to sell things,” said Rustam, who has a small shop in Vose. “We have our own private business, and we’re not going to harvest cotton for pennies.”

Rustam says he was forced to close his shop a week ago, after a visit by local government official who warned him of the consequences of disobeying the order. Other traders tell similar stories, saying they can’t afford to risk angering the authorities.

Public-sector employees are under particular pressure to go out into the fields. At the beginning of October, journalist Farrukh Akhrorov was sacked by Leninabadskaya Pravda, the main government-run newspaper in Soghd region, for refusing to spend his Saturdays picking cotton.

According to Akhrorov, the newspaper’s chief editor told him to resign or be sacked. His resignation letter reads, “I ask to be dismissed at my own request, as I cannot work as an auxiliary in agriculture.”

Despite the privatisation of cotton production, the “cotton campaign” is portrayed in the media and in official speeches as if it was still a government-run operation. The national “plan” is a recurring theme, and state television updates progress region by region every day.

However, Deputy Prime Minister Kozidavlat Koimdodov, who is in charge of agriculture, told IWPR that there was no centrally-imposed plan, and growers were free to act as they saw fit.

Independent political scientist Tursun Kabirov agrees with this view, saying local authorities have taken the president’s words too literally.

“Talk of the cotton harvest plan presumably means the plans that private farms have submitted to the agriculture ministry, which carry no obligations with them,” he said. “However, the regional authorities believe that just as in the old days, this is a plan set by the country’s leadership. And as with any order from the president, they are afraid that it will not be carried out in full.”

Cotton is Tajikistan’s most important cash crop and, next to the aluminium industry, a mainstay of the economy, accounting for about a quarter of much-needed export revenues.

In the late Soviet period, the country produced around 900,000 tons of raw cotton annually, but the general economic collapse that followed the end of the USSR, accentuated by five years of civil war and ecological factors, meant the harvest was slashed to below 500,000 tons a year.

Last year’s target of 600,000 tons was missed by a substantial 70,000 tons, but the government has set an even more ambitious goal of 610,000 tons for 2004.

One reason why cotton production – which in theory should be a rich earner for everyone involved in it – remains in precarious condition is the way the business is structured. Private farmers take out loans from private investors to pay for inputs such as seeds, fertiliser and fuel at the start of the spring planting season, and the debts tend to mount from year to year when the harvest volumes or market prices prove lower than expected.

The agriculture ministry estimates that the total debt owed by farmers comes to 160 million dollars, and experts say this means that almost all the money they earn this year will go towards paying this off. As a result, many farmers end up permanently in hock to the businessmen who lend them the money and often supply the agricultural inputs as well.

President Rahmonov has issued an edict ordering farmers to clear the debts they owe for advance loans. But Kabirov believes such intervention in the relationship between farmer and lender is heavy-handed and inappropriate, given that this is supposed to be a free market rather than a state-run Soviet industry.

“The issue of cotton farmers’ debts is solely a problem for private business, and the government should not interfere in this process,” he said.

Zafar Abdullaev is an independent journalist in Dushanbe.