In Uzbekistan’s case, the new “cluster” firms have taken over the state’s longtime monopoly on the most profitable aspects of agriculture.
Uzbek state banks have disbursed hundreds of millions of dollars to the private firms from loans received through the World Bank’s Horticulture Development Project since January 2018, when Tashkent launched its cluster reforms.
Uzbek authorities also marked out exclusive territorial control for each of the new private agribusinesses without any public bidding process.
The World Bank says the funds it has provided were meant to help create “better paid jobs in rural areas” where about half of Uzbekistan’s 32 million people live.
Uzbekistan has made enormous progress in eliminating forced labor, but has yet to fully eradicate it.
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December 15, 2020
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After 10 years of monitoring and reporting on forced child and adult labor in Uzbekistan’s cotton sector, cataloging the journey toward the significant improvements that have been achieved through Uzbek President Shavkat Mirziyoyev’s ambitious reform program, there is a glimmer of hope that a historic moment may be on the horizon. However, Uzbek Forum’s monitoring findings of the 2020 harvest thus far shows that forced labor in Uzbekistan has not yet entered the annals of history.
Despite a considerable reduction in the number of those forced to pick cotton over the last three years, decades of state-orchestrated mobilization of cotton pickers has embedded itself so deeply in the production of cotton in the country that government officials, at least in some districts and regions, continue to resort to the usual methods of coercion to