Forced Labor Remains Central to Turkmenistan’s Cotton Harvest |
Crossroads Asia | Society | Central Asia
Forced Labor Remains Central to Turkmenistan’s Cotton Harvest
Despite small steps in 2023 and 2024, the 2025 harvest reportedly saw a complete return to the mobilization of state employees into the fields.
The Turkmen government backtracked during the 2025 cotton harvest on small steps taken in the previous two years to lesson the usage of forced labor, the Cotton Campaign coalition said in a new report.
Progress on eliminating forced labor is not necessarily linear, and positive developments in one harvest can be unwound the following year without sustained political will and market pressure.
The report – “Turkmenistan Cotton: State-Imposed Forced Labor in the Annual Cotton Harvest, High Risk in Global Supply Chains” – presents the findings of independent civil society monitoring of the 2025 cotton harvest in Turkmenistan by Turkmen.News and Turkmen Initiative for Human Rights. The Progres Foundation also continued to the report.
During the 2023 and 2024 harvest, the Cotton Campaign reported that the Turkmen government took steps to reduce state-imposed forced labor, namely the mobilization of some state employees into the fields.
In their 2025 report, covering the 2024 harvest, the Cotton Campaign said, “Public authorities did not mobilize or extort doctors working in some regional hospitals and teachers working in some schools, although they continued to subject all other groups of state employees to forced labor.”
In the just-released report, covering the 2025, harvest, the Cotton Campaign notes that this small step – not forcing doctors and teachers to pick cotton – had been reversed.
“In the 2025 cotton harvest, the government of Turkmenistan forced all groups of state employees – including teachers and technical staff of schools, doctors and nurses, and employees of utilities organizations and cultural centers – to pick cotton or pay for replacement pickers.”
Turkmenistan is one of the most closed countries in the world. It scrapes the bottom of rankings like Freedom House’s Freedom in the World (with a score of 1 out of 100). Monitoring the cotton harvest is thus a risky endeavor. The involved civil society organizations – Turkmen.News and the Turkmen Initiative for Human Rights – work from exile and monitor the harvest through a network of independent informants inside the country. While the International Labor Organization (ILO) was allowed to conduct monitoring in 2024 and 2025, the Cotton Campaign pointed out that “interference with their monitoring was a persistent challenge during both harvests.”
The Cotton........