Wal-Mart is claiming dramatic progress on eliminating child labour in the central Asian republic of Uzbekistan by using its purchasing and lobbying power against the country’s government.
The world’s largest retailer this summer joined trade associations representing the apparel sector to demand that the Uzbek government withdraw its support for the use of child labour in the annual cotton harvest. The government has now banned the practice, ratified International Labour Organization conventions on child labour, and produced a national child labour action plan for all industry sectors.
Wal-Mart, which backed its lobbying with a decision to stop sourcing cotton from Uzbekistan, has welcomed the changes, but will not buy again from Uzbekistan until the retailer can independently verify that the government’s action is effective.
Wal-Mart’s campaign was supported by four industry trade groups whose members account for 90 per cent of US purchases of cotton and cotton-based merchandise, among them the American Association of Footwear and Apparel.
Corporate members of the associations were not formally asked to stop sourcing from Uzbekistan, but their combined weight, plus Wal-Mart’s sourcing ban, appears to have had a significant impact in Uzbekistan, the world’s second largest cotton exporter.
Although Wal-Mart’s intervention seems to have been crucial, other companies had stopped sourcing from Uzbekistan since the beginning of this year, notably C&A, Gap, H&M, Tesco, and Marks & Spencer.
For years, hundreds of thousands of children have been forcibly withdrawn from school by the Uzbek authorities for the cotton harvest, which begins in mid-September. In 2000, Unicef estimated that 23 per cent of children in Uzbekistan aged between five and 14 worked in the cotton industry. Under the new rules anyone under the age of 15 can no longer be engaged in any employment.
However, the Environmental Justice Foundation, a pressure group at the forefront of campaigns against child labour in the former Soviet republic, fears that little will be done on the ground and the official measures may be a ‘public relations offensive’.
It claims full and independent verification of the situation ‘is extremely difficult’, given the regime’s repressive nature, and suggests that it might be difficult for companies to check what is happening on the ground.
Other non-governmental organizations say that even if the government is serious, universal observation of the ban will take time. Farmers have to meet official cotton production quotas and will not easily or cheaply replace the child labour on which they have come to rely. Cotton accounts for 60 per cent of Uzbekistan’s export earnings.
Nadezhda Ataeva, head of the Paris-based Human Rights in Central Asia Association, said: ‘The national action plan makes no provision for human rights activists... to monitor its implementation, so there is every reason to believe compulsory [child] labour will recur.’