In September hundreds of thousands of Uzbek children will be taking to the fields to pick cotton. But this is no rural idyll. For two months the children are forced by their government to partake in one of the world’s most enduring examples of large-scale, abusive child labour.
Getting independent information out of Uzbekistan is almost impossible. Informers tend to be imprisoned, exiled or killed. But last October investigators for the Environmental Justice Foundation (EJF) managed to go in undercover and observe what happened during the annual harvest. The result is Still in the Fields, a shocking report recently released to coincide with a meeting of the International Labour Organization (ILO).
