Tesco bows to pressure over Uzbekistani cotton

Tesco has asked its suppliers to stop sourcing cotton from Uzbekistan over concerns about state-sponsored child labour. The supermarket chain has made its decision after a three-year campaign by the Environmental Justice Foundation and a recent report on BBC TV’s Newsnight programme.

The foundation says thousands of children in the central Asian republic are forcibly withdrawn from school by the government every year for the cotton harvest. The US Dept. of State noted that ‘Enforcement [of the national labour code] was lacking due to long-standing societal acceptance of child labor as a cheap method of cotton harvesting’.

Terry Green, chief executive of Tesco clothing and hardlines, has told suppliers in a letter that ‘the use of organized and forced child labour is completely unacceptable and leads us to conclude that whilst these practices persist we cannot support the use of cotton from Uzbekistan in our textiles’.

Green says it is not always easy for suppliers to identify the sources of their cotton, but from this autumn the supermarket will require them to do so ‘wherever possible’ and to notify the retailer if they cannot.

Tesco says it will carry out random inspections and has asked suppliers to return a signed copy of the letter to indicate they will heed the request.

The foundation has now urged other retailers to follow Tesco’s example, and M&S has since initiated a ban. However one rival, Asda, has suggested Tesco’s new stance is more style than substance. It said it was ‘very interested’ to hear Tesco’s pledges but ‘even keener to understand how they plan to meet those commitments’.

Asda added: ‘We make no bones about the fact that the international supply chain for cotton is extremely complicated. Full traceability of where raw cotton originates from is very difficult to achieve. At this time we do not believe a boycott of cotton from Uzbekistan is achievable.’

However, Asda said it would ‘work with the government and our suppliers to discuss what further pressure we can apply to bring about an improvement in the conditions of people working in the cotton industry there’.

Uzbekistan is the world’s third largest cotton exporter and 70 per cent of its exports are controlled by three state trading organizations. Its main market is Europe which buys around $350million (£175m) of cotton a year.

Arcadia Group, which owns Burtons and Top Man, said it had asked all its suppliers to check their raw cotton sources, but ‘nothing untoward’ had been found to date.

Matalan said it was consulting suppliers ‘to understand the extent of the issue’.

The former Soviet state of Uzbekistan has been criticized by human rights bodies on a number of grounds, including torture, arbitrary arrest, human trafficking and lack of freedom of speech and free association. It ranks 175th out of 179 in Transparency International’s Corruption Perception index.