The practice of forced labor in the cotton sector began in the Soviet period and has continued without interruption to this day. It is used on a massive scale, despite the fact that cotton is no longer the chief export commodity for Turkmenistan. Every season, tens of thousands of Turkmens from cities and the countryside are forced to work in the cotton fields. Mandatory standards are set for the amount of cotton harvested, and those who refuse to go to the fields or are unable to meet the quota are either fired from work or are punished in other ways.

This is the second part of the Cotton harvest campaign monitoring prepared by Alternative Turkmenistan News (ATN), a civil media initiative founded in 2010. The key message of this monitoring is that by sending tens of thousands of state-employed people to harvest cotton every autumn the Turkmen authorities for years have been violating the International Labor Organization’s (ILO) Convention №105, which prohibits forced labor and Convention №29 on forced labor.

Each year Thailand’s shrimp industry exports hundreds of thousands of tons of shrimp, (worth roughly USD 1.5 billion) to the United States, its largest export market. The shrimp are raised on farms, peeled, cooked, processed and packaged by a low‐paid workforce that is made up almost entirely of migrant workers from Burma, Cambodia and Laos. Many of these workers are trafficked into the country by labor brokers and are often subjected to labor exploitation and debt bondage.

Today we would like to share some facts, figures and details of this year’s cotton campaign. The
information has been gathered by our readers - the actual participants of the current campaign, located in different regions of the country.