"Hamma Paktaga!" The road block said it all. Get out there everyone. There’s cotton to be picked! The first cotton harvest of the new millennium continues as relentless as ever. One might have hoped that the dawn of the 21st century would have signaled something new on the foreign-exchange-earner front for Uzbekistan, cotton basket of the former Soviet Union. But this year’s campaign is more fraught and destined to last longer than ever. The Uzbek government is resorting to desperate measures to gather this year's cotton harvest before the announced deadline of 15 November. All hospital and medical staff is now signed up for picking and clinics are operating at half strength. All non-essential staff is now out in the fields. Public buses have been pressed into transportation duty, and heavy fines are imposed on private transport owners found to be carrying potential pickers. Even pregnant women have been dragooned into service. With wages of just over one cent a kilo, Uzbeks are understandably angry at the disruption to their lives caused by this annual ritual.

The precious commodity, draining the land of priceless water reserves and killing the already exhausted earth, not to mention the people, is doggedly planted every year. Ambitious targets are always drawn up and no effort spared by each mayor to ensure that his job, which depends on a successful harvest, is safe for another year. Usually the plan is announced in advance and progress heralded on prime time TV as regions battle it out for first place. For two months, national and local media are swamped with stories of cotton heroes who brave pesticides, defoliants and polluted drinking water, not that these are actually mentioned in public, to bring in hundreds of kilos of the white gold. After the Great October Revolution of 1917, and Communism’s imposition on Central Asia, cotton growing began in earnest. Controversy has plagued its central place as a cash crop in this, one of civilization’s most ancient places, since its catastrophic ecological impact came to light.

The Aral Sea disaster can largely be blamed on elaborate irrigation schemes designed to produce greater yields in an area blatantly unsuited to the crop, with its attendant loss of livelihoods, respiratory diseases, soaring infant mortality and the destruction of the country’s ecosystem. Today they continue picking for their country’s very survival. This year the media have been strangely silent on the substance of the plan. No one has been told what the targets are, they have simply been told to pick. Crippling droughts in the west of the country and projected famine around the Aral Sea have meant drier soils and a poorer crop, which of course means disaster for cotton. Nobody of course will spell that out or even hint that the hallowed plan could be in jeopardy. Instead, cotton picker trawling becomes the national sport and one which assumes ever greater urgency as the weather cools and the frost beckons.

Every year there are rumors that this will be the last for students. The students carry fold up beds, quilts and enough perishable food to last the first few days. When they arrive several hours later, a disused village school, a single pump and if they are lucky a couple of pit latrines in a strange region will be their home until the last wisp of cotton is gathered from the ground. The human costs are great. Although many students have a ball and enjoy a fling away from home, sickness from foul ditches and irrigation channels used for drinking water is rife. There are several cases of local boys raping girl students each year and each region records at least two or three deaths. Villagers anxious to get the students off their land sell their own first pickings, which have already been weighed and included in the figures, to the visitors at inflated prices. And so the lies and injustices go on. The greatest lie being Uzbekistan’s suitability for cotton at all.

.Jennifer Balfour, educator in Central Asia