A long media campaign in the Uzbek media proved to be a bubble because the fair has not become a great event in the country’s life when independent journalists who tried to visit the fair could not see crowds of Uzbek people who are proud of their cotton and buyers of it flooding the fair.
The only thing independent journalists could do is to have petty arguments with police who set up several cordons around Inter-Continental Hotel and organisers from the Uzbek Foreign Economic Relations, Investment and Trade Ministry.
Journalists who were not on the lists of journalists accredited by the Foreign Minister were told by the Foreign Economic Relations, Investment and Trade Ministry’s spokeswoman Tatyana Orlova: “You can only take press releases, but nothing else and we will not let you visit the fair.”
Independent journalists could not to interview foreign participants either because young smartly-dressed operatives kept interrupting them that they would be able to get all the necessary information after the event.
This is the fourth international cotton fair in Uzbekistan, but in the past the authorities were far easier about the press’s presence at it, allowing anyone who produce a journalist’s ID to attend it.
When there is no official explanation about the refusal to accredit independent journalists for the fair, journalists themselves had to offer their reflections. The widespread assumption is that Tashkent does not need “politically unreliable” journalists’ contacts with foreign cotton traders.
The Uzbek government has been under fire for several years by retailers and textile producers who refuse to buy Uzbek cotton because of child labour used in its production. Four major British and American companies – Tesco, Marks & Spencer, Target and Gap – have declared boycott to Uzbek cotton. The USA’s Wal-Mart has also joined this boycott.
Despite government pledges and the country’s ratification of UN convention on eradicating child labour, Uzbekistan had to send children to fields again to pick cotton this year.
The country produces about 3.6 million tonnes of cotton a year, but farmers say that this is physically impossible to do.
That is why neither the Uzbek government nor foreign buyers of cotton will benefit from contracts signed at the Uzbek cotton fair because no-one wants the whole world to know about their contracts to buy cotton picked by children.