By Mansur Mirovalev
ASSOCIATED PRESS
September 5, 2010

For one month a year, from morning to night, Dilorom Nishanova grows silkworms, a painstaking, exhausting job. She has been doing it since she was 8.

Uzbekistan's authoritarian government insists child labor is banned, but Nishanova, now 15, hasn't heard of a ban. She and her siblings, ages 9 to 17, think it's normal to be helping their father grow silkworms, as well as cotton and wheat.

"We just help our parents," she said, her braided dark hair covered with a traditional Muslim scarf. "That's what children have to do, right?"

Not so, say Uzbek rights groups. They say kids shouldn't be laborers, especially in May, the silk season, which happens to fall during school exams.

The silkworm business dates back centuries to the Silk Road, which ran through this Central Asian country. Kokand, the name of the town in the Ferghana Valley where Dilorom's family farms, is the same as the Uzbek word for "cocoon." Kokand was the destination of the first westbound Chinese caravan carrying silk in 121 B.C., which started the fabled trade route.

But the silk business's modern-day incarnation as a state monopoly has a dark side. Farmers say that they are threatened with fines or loss of their land leases for missing quotas, and that these are so high that they have no choice but to draft their children into the work.

The use of child labor in Uzbek cotton-picking has been widely documented, and Walmart and several other U.S. chain stores won't stock Uzbek cotton. But the silk industry has largely escaped international scrutiny.

Uzbek silk's annual revenues are tiny compared with the $1 billion cotton industry, but the government prizes silk as a link - and tourist draw - to the glory days of the Silk Road.

It also considers silk an export item that has to be state-controlled - like the exports of cotton, gold, peregrine falcons and the pelts of newborn lambs.

Uzbekistan's production accounts for less than 5 percent of the world total, and it is dwarfed by China's. But it's proportionately the world's highest - about 2 pounds per capita for the population of 27 million. Kakhhor Yavkashtiyev, chief of the Agriculture Ministry's silk-growing department, says 90 percent of Uzbekistan's 2 million farmers are involved in the annual harvest.

"Children are not involved; only adults are," he insisted.
Umurzak Kayumov, a 51-year-old farmer from the village of Naiman, says his children as well as grandchildren help during cocoon season, when "we suffer for 25 days, from 4 a.m. until midnight."

In Kokand, the intensity of raising silkworms becomes evident from talking to Dilorom and her family.

Her father, Adkham, 42, farms 10 acres. In early May, he said, an official from a state-owned nursery handed him two 1-ounce boxes of silkworm eggs to be nurtured into about 220 pounds of cocoons.

Within four weeks of hatching, silkworms grow to 10,000 times their original, poppy-seed size. Their creamy stomachs turn greenish from their diet of mulberry leaves, and they need constant attention. "They're as helpless as newborn babies," Dilorom said.

They feed seven times a day and die if their meal is an hour late. Dead ones must be removed promptly lest they infect the others swarming among the fresh mulberry twigs that Dilorom has risen at dawn to gather.

Sensitive to light, noise and breezes, the silkworms grow up in a humid barn next to the family's dilapidated adobe house. Their munching sounds like the patter of raindrops.
Speaking of this year's silkworm season, Dilorom recalled: "We worked hard, had to miss some classes. Just like many other kids in school."

"In some schools, they raise silkworms as part of their home economics class," said Khaitboy Yakubov of Najot, a rights group in the western city of Urgench.

For farmers and their children, "silk farming opens an annual cycle of forced labor and abuse by authorities," said Ganikhon Mamatkhonov, a rights activist who investigated numerous cases of abuse of Uzbek farmers.

Silk-growing nations such as South Korea and Japan have switched to less labor-intensive mulberry bushes and mechanized leaf harvest.

But Uzbek authorities prefer to "follow the old school where big mulberry trees are utilized for feeding silkworms," said Hisham Greiss, a Chicago-based expert on silk farming.

Sukhrobjon Ismoilov of the Expert Working Group, an independent think tank based in the capital, Tashkent, says local officials threaten to annul land leases, delay payments by government-affiliated banks and even resort to physical abuse for farmers who fall short.