Description
Was the shirt on your back made using forced child labour? It’s an uncomfortable thought, one that we normally push to the back of our minds as we search out bargains on the High Street.
And companies make it easy for us to ignore the problem – reassuring the consumer that manufacturers adhere to strict codes of conduct.
But what about the raw materials, such as cotton, which are used to make the clothes? It is often claimed it is difficult – in a global marketplace – to ever be certain where materials such as cotton have come from.
Stores say they have little or no control where the raw materials come from and they rely on their suppliers to source the materials. But is that really the case?
What if you were able to follow the trail from the clothes rack to the factory and back to the fields where the cotton has been harvested. That’s exactly what we did with an undercover reporter and what we found was simply breathtaking.
As part of a special report we filmed children in Uzbekistan being forced to work in cotton fields instead of going to school. For two-and-a-half months a year, classrooms are emptied across this Central Asian nation so that the crop can be harvested.
The cotton industry is big business and is completely controlled by the country’s brutal authoritarian regime. President Islam Karimov takes a ruthless approach to all forms of opposition.
In 2005 the army put an end to street protests in the city of Andijan by killing hundreds of demonstrators. Scores of dissidents and journalists were thrown in jail.
Uzbekistan is the second largest exporter of cotton in the world – and reporting from there posed some real challenges. To even get into the country the team had to pose as reporters from a textile industry magazine.
At a conference in Uzbekistan for the cotton industry the journalists met representatives from top US and European companies.