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What’s so bad about cotton conscription, anyhow? Part 1: toxins
Cotton picking after use of defoliants
There are sometimes blog commenters (and authors!) who downplay the harm to children brought on by their forced stints in the fields each Fall. Never mind that the work clearly meets the standards of the UN Convention on the Worst Forms of Child Labor. The thinking goes, if I did this back in college and it was a lark, just young people out in nature enjoying their freedom…
It’s clear, however, that times have changed from those kindler, gentler (!) Soviet days, when the much of Uzbekistan’s cotton was picked by machine. Now kids are responsible for bringing in at least half the harvest; they’re not fed or paid decently; the coercion keeping them in the fields is much more intense. Even more brutally, the process can and does compromise their health and well-being, sometimes fatally.
Pesticide and defoliant exposure
The picture you see here shows fields in early October this year after defoliants have been sprayed. You will sometimes hear the argument that agrochemical use is much less than in Soviet times because the cost for the nominally independent shirkat farms is greater. But when the provincial government has to bring in the harvest to make the plan, they find a way to access what they need.
A study published back in 1989 in the Archives of Environmental Health showed that:
Fatigue, eye irritation, rhinitis, throat irritation, nausea, and diarrhea were statistically elevated in rates adjusted for age, sex, and race and were reported 60-100% more frequently by respondents living or working near sprayed cotton fields than by the comparison group.
And that was just for people working near the fields. Imagine how you would fare if you were actually in them for 8-10 hours per day, with the residue all over your clothes and skin? And if you were an undernourished small child, for whom a bad diarrhea could be debilitating, even dangerous?
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