Uzbekistan’s cotton sector, long associated with state control and forced labor, is now facing a different but equally destructive crisis. Despite promises of reform and privatization, private cotton clusters – the powerful companies that dominate cotton production – have accumulated huge debts to farmers dating back to the 2023–2024 harvests. These unpaid debts, acknowledged by the chairman of the Tax Committee, Sherzod Kudbiyev, have left farmers struggling to pay taxes, cover salaries, or repay their own loans. Yet, instead of addressing these structural injustices, authorities continue to tighten control over farmers who try to escape cluster dependency.
The recent case of the Hosildor Oltintola cooperative in Surkhandarya, reported by Kun.uz in August 2025, shows the extent to which farmers’ attempts at independence are crushed by bureaucratic barriers and administrative coercion. Twelve farmers united to cultivate 360 hectares of cotton at their own expense. Their goal was straightforward: process their own harvest, negotiate fair prices, and escape dependence on clusters notorious for delaying or withholding payments. They invested heavily — renting land for cotton collection, purchasing laboratory equipment, and modernizing their production with land-leveling units. Instead of encouragement, they faced relentless obstruction.
The government imposed a tight technical registration deadline for inclusion on the state-run Agroplatform, knowing full well it was impossible to meet in the short time provided. This became the justification for excluding Hosildor Oltintola from the platform, thereby denying the cooperative the legal right to independently collect or sell cotton. Local officials then issued an ultimatum: sign a futures contract with the local cluster within fifteen days or face exclusion from the market altogether. The choice offered to the farmers was not freedom but submission.
Cooperative chairman Abdurasul Haitov voiced what many farmers feel: “First of all, a farmer should be free. There should be no orders, no pressures.” His statement cuts through the illusion of reform. While Uzbekistan’s leaders promote agricultural modernization in international fora, the lived reality for farmers is continued authoritarian control. They are treated not as independent entrepreneurs but as subordinates forced to serve the interests of clusters — entities often closely linked to local officials and their rent-seeking networks.
This is not an isolated incident. As Uzbek Forum for Human Rights reported, in 2023, the Oltin Tola Boston cooperative in Karakalpakstan was forcibly liquidated despite full legal registration and compliance with cotton sales regulations. Courts relied on flimsy legal reasoning, ignoring the fact that alleged deficiencies had already been corrected. That case exposed the lack of freedom of association in Uzbekistan’s agricultural sector. Two years later, the persecution of Hosildor Oltintola proves that the same tactics of administrative sabotage are still at play.
The implications are profound. Around the world, agricultural cooperatives drive rural development. They reduce input costs, strengthen bargaining power, improve access to credit, and open new markets, including export opportunities. In Uzbekistan, however, every attempt to develop such structures is met with obstruction. Authorities fear that strong cooperatives would undermine cluster dominance — and with it, the entrenched financial and political interests that clusters protect.
Uzbekistan rightly earned international recognition for ending systemic forced labor in its cotton fields. Yet what is happening today reveals that reform is incomplete. When farmers are denied their right to freely associate and trade, when they are forced into contracts against their will, when they bear the tax burden while clusters sit on unpaid debts — the system remains coercive, only in a different form.
The fate of Hosildor Oltintola is not only about twelve farmers in Surkhandarya. It exposes the weaknesses in Uzbekistan’s reform agenda and its efforts to disguise control as liberalization. Unless genuine freedom of association is guaranteed and cooperatives are allowed to function without coercion, Uzbekistan risks undoing the progress it has made and exposing its reforms as nothing more than empty promises.
