Some 12 or Younger : Soviet Cotton Harvest: Job for Children

Two thousand miles from Moscow, in the Soviet Union’s deep south, the annual campaign is under way to harvest the “white gold” of Central Asia, as the official press reverently describes the cotton crop, the country’s only important agricultural export.

Amid a backward trend toward greater reliance on manual labor, thousands of children across Central Asia, some of them 12 years old or younger, will spend the next two months working in organized school brigades alongside adults in the cotton fields of Uzbekistan, Tadzhikistan, Turkmenia and Kirghizia.

According to official reports, Central Asian children often spend 60 to 70 days out of school each fall picking cotton. Some are sent hundreds of miles from home to live in cramped and unsanitary barracks, earning as little as four rubles ($5) for every 100 pounds of cotton they pick.

Pay for Own Food

From these meager earnings, children are reportedly expected to pay for their own food. And some collective farms routinely dock the pay of schoolchildren who fail to pick a minimum daily quota.

In addition, there are indications that many children come home from the cotton fields showing symptoms of poisoning from chemical defoliants sprayed on the fields.

The intensive use of manual labor, especially child labor, runs counter to official Soviet policy. Indeed, the Soviet Union holds up the exploitation of children elsewhere in the world as a leading sin of capitalism. But Central Asia is far from Moscow, the pressure to produce ever-increasing amounts of cotton for domestic use and for export is high and old habits die hard.

In addition, some officials justify field work for Soviet children as a useful form of “labor education.”

Child Labor Widespread

Scattered articles in the Soviet press, along with reports from travelers in rural Central Asia, make it clear that the use of child labor not only is widespread but may have increased recently as the result of an abrupt retreat from mechanization that also conflicts with the government’s general economic policy.

Over the last two years, cotton-producing collective farms have offset the declining size and quality of the crop by increased use of hand labor. According to Western economic analysts, two-thirds of the 1983 crop was picked by machine and one-third by hand. In 1984, the proportions were reversed--with two-thirds picked by hand--and the pattern appears to have been maintained this year.

The Soviet Union produces nearly 9 million metric tons of cotton annually, ranking it second in the world in an approximate tie with the United States; China is the world leader.

More than 5 million tons of the Soviet crop comes from the largely desert Uzbek Republic, or Uzbekistan. An ancient center of civilization best known for the Islamic cities of Samarkand and Bukhara, Uzbekistan was subjugated by czarist armies in the 1860s and forcibly transformed into the Russian Empire’s principal cotton colony.

To a large extent, it still is that. Propaganda billboards, wall slogans and the official press leave little doubt that Uzbekistan’s main economic priority is the production of “white gold,” which covers more than half the republic’s irrigated land.

When irrigation water is in short supply, which is often the case, it is diverted preferentially from food-producing farms to the cotton fields. In an effort to expand both food and cotton production, the Soviet Union has begun a gigantic project to turn part of the northward-flowing Ob and Irtysh rivers in Siberia southward to the Uzbek desert.

The role of children in the cotton harvest is something of an embarrassment to the government, but critical articles nonetheless do appear from time to time in the official press. These reports, however, tend to single out isolated rural districts as examples, while only hinting at the full scope of child labor.

2 Million Young Pickers

The Communist Party newspaper Pravda, for instance, reported that in 1983, in one cotton-producing district of Osh province in Kirghizia, “schoolchildren harvested nearly one-third of the entire cotton crop.” This occurred before last year’s sharp reversion to hand labor. In 1978, the Soviet press reported that in Uzbekistan alone, the number of adults and schoolchildren drafted from jobs and classrooms to pick cotton was 2 million.

“Certain officials sometimes fail to see that they enjoy even elementary living conditions,” Pravda said in an article last year headlined “Schoolchildren in the Field.” The newspaper noted that farm administrators frequently neglected to provide the children with beds, sheets, blankets, or a place to bathe.

At the same time, Pravda observed, it often happened that more than half the collective farmers who should have been working in the fields were absent, while the local teahouses were filled with able-bodied men “discussing the crops for days on end.”

In the Tashkent province of Uzbekistan, parents of children at Yangiyul Secondary School No. 2 wrote to the newspaper Teacher’s Gazette to complain of primitive living conditions on a state cotton farm where high school students were sent to work in fields 200 miles from home.

“The crowding is unbelievable, the sanitary conditions are unsatisfactory, and it’s cold,” the parents wrote in a group letter. “The youngsters work in the fields all day long. They don’t always meet their quotas. And since the cost of meals is deducted from their earnings, you can imagine how well they’re fed on days when their norms are unfulfilled and their earnings are practically nothing.”

Other reports published over the last year tell of children obliged to drink from irrigation ditches and to pay for their own harvesting aprons. Many come home with colds.

‘The Food Was Bad’

“Here in the town of Kanibadam, they took the children away for two months,” another group of parents, in Tadzhikistan, complained in a published letter. “They slept on the floor, there wasn’t enough water and the food was bad.”

Teacher’s Gazette quoted in disapproving tones a local party official in Uzbekistan who defended the employment of children as a valuable lesson in the dignity of labor, fully in keeping with current educational reforms.

“What’s abnormal about this?” the party official, Olga M. Petrenko, asked in defense of the practice. “The entire (Uzbek) republic goes out to harvest cotton. The children work, too. . . . In the cotton fields, the youngsters show heroism and grow up to be patriots.”

Despite the critical tone of the article, the newspaper concluded that the main question was not whether the children should work in the fields “but under what conditions.”

The Soviet Ministry of Education has decreed that field work is an appropriate way of fulfilling nationwide curriculum requirements for “labor training.” The problem, the newspaper said, is that the practice has been to keep the children in the fields not just for their edification but until the entire Uzbek Republic reached its harvest target.

According to independent Soviet sources, such criticism reflects universal practices in Central Asia, not isolated instances. Reports vary, however, on the minimum age of children sent to the cotton fields.

Work 60-70 Days a Year

“Everyone in our district has to work 60 to 70 days a year in September, October and November, but only in the last two years of school (aged 16 and 17) and not kids from the biggest cities,” said an Uzbek student interviewed recently in Moscow. “The younger kids are too short to reach the cotton and they don’t do a thorough job.”

His chief memory of the experience, the student said, was how much his back ached. Lost school time, he said, was partially made up by canceling winter and spring vacations.

But a Soviet scientist who recently visited the rural Andizhan district, a major cotton-growing province in Uzbekistan, said there appeared to be no lower-age limit for fieldwork.

“Everyone, adults and children down to the age of 7 or 8, was out in the fields picking cotton,” the scientist said. “It was child labor, pure and simple.”

The effects of prolonged field work on children’s health are rarely discussed in the Soviet press. As long ago as 1974, however, dissident physicist Andrei D. Sakharov--now being held incommunicado in internal exile--maintained that nearly all school-age children in Uzbekistan showed signs of illness after two months of breathing the vapors of chemical defoliants sprayed on the cotton fields.

In a rare exception to official silence on this subject, the February, 1984, issue of Pamir, a Tadzhik literary journal, provided corroborating evidence.

A Threat to Health

“Of course defoliation is necessary and economically profitable, but the aircraft, when spraying defoliants, fly over fields where children are working. This cannot help but affect their health,” the journal said in reporting on a round table discussion of village life held by a group of writers.

Describing the work as seen through the eyes of a sixth-grade girl in the fields, one author noted the pungent smell of defoliants in the air and remarked on the headaches it caused.

In one instance, apparently commonplace, a foreman was said to have failed to clear children from a field where they were working when a crop-dusting plane began its spraying run. He was “not an unkindly man,” but he was short of his production target.

Safety rules were said to require banning workers from the fields for three days after spraying, but one author in Pamir quoted a local Tadzhik as remarking, “Where and when has this rule been observed?”

The use of children in the cotton fields is part of a much larger mobilization of the Soviet Union’s non-farming population that takes place every year in a rush to bring in the crops.

Across the country, several million adults are drafted from offices and factories each autumn and sent off, along with college-age students, to spend anywhere from a week to a month in the muddy fields of state collective farms picking cabbages and digging potatoes, carrots and beets.

These reluctant armies of amateur vegetable diggers are symptomatic of the serious problems that afflict agriculture in the northern Russian heartland. Among them are a low level of farm mechanization and a labor shortage in the countryside that is worsening as millions of young people flee the primitive conditions and the boredom of village life.

Farmers Vanish

Compounding the labor problem, collective farmers themselves tend to disappear from the state fields this time of year to harvest their own private plots, which generate an important part of peasant income. These tiny patches of hand-worked soil allotted by the state take up only 3% of the Soviet Union’s cultivated land, but they produce more than 30% of its meat, milk, eggs, fruit and vegetables.

In Central Asia, however, there is no shortage of adult labor in the countryside, which registers the highest birthrate and the lowest mobility in the Soviet Union.

Even so, the conscription of laborers each fall extends deep into the ranks of rural schoolchildren, who routinely end up missing a quarter of their classroom time in an all-out effort to meet the government’s cotton-production targets.

Actually, Central Asia’s population is mobilized each year not to bring in a food crop but a cash crop. Besides supplying most of the cotton needed by the Soviet Union and Eastern Europe, the southern republics earn the state about $100 million a year from cotton exports to the West.

According to Western economic analysts, last year’s backward shift to manual labor in the cotton fields resulted from three factors: a decline in the cotton crop in 1983, poor design and maintenance of harvesting machines, and a new government regulation last year under which state-controlled collective farms are paid not only according to the weight of the crop but also its quality.

This meant that farms would no longer be credited for the rocks, dirt, leaves and stems scooped up in prodigious quantities by Soviet harvesting machines.

Better Crop Yields

Switching back to hand picking also made it possible to sweep through fields two or three times as the bolls ripen, increasing the yield, rather than once with a machine that strips the plants bare.

In a recent front-page editorial that made no reference to children, Pravda complained that the continued reliance on manual labor is wrong. Even so, it appears to be having the desired effect. According to Western analysts, the quality of Soviet cotton showed a marked improvement in 1984 that seems likely to be maintained as the harvest proceeds this year.

Once again, thanks to small hands and large, Soviet Central Asia will yield its cornucopia of “white gold.”

Nevertheless, with about 10% of the crop exported to Eastern Europe and the West, cotton remains in short supply at home. Cotton clothing is often hard to find--partly because the Soviet Union lags far behind the rest of the industrialized world in adopting synthetic substitutes--while the medical press complains frequently about shortages of sterile cotton wadding in drugstores and hospitals.