Child cotton slaves of an Asian tyranny

When the school summer holidays begin, Shamsiddin will get up at 4am and work the fields with his bare hands until dusk. His hands will bleed from tugging at the cotton plants, his back will ache, and he will be inhaling the fertilisers and pesticides that locals say kill even rats.

As last year, this will be his daily routine until October brings the harvest to a close - or until the snows fall in December, if he does not meet the state production target. Over three months he will probably earn 3,000 local soums - £2. Shamsiddin is enslaved on the bottom rung of Uzbekistan's multi-billion-dollar cotton industry - whose produce ends up on finely woven and dyed garments in Britain's high streets. He is 11 years old.

Uzbekistan - one of the world's most tyrannical regimes where the US State Department has reported: 'torture is a routine [police] investigation technique' - sends all of its schoolchildren into the fields to pick cotton. Whole villages and families are forced to work the land, as the output of the kolkhoz - the old Soviet word for collective farm - is tightly regulated. Families rely on the labour of their children, from five years old, to help out in hard times.

'The entire cotton economy in Uzbekistan is based on a system of modern serfdom,' said Fiona Hill, from the Foreign Policy Studies Programme at the Brookings Institution, who recently travelled to Uzbekistan to investigate the industry. 'It is extremely labour-intensive. And without what is essentially the slave labour of adult farmers and their children, the industry would certainly not be viable.'

Last year, according to a senior Western official, a hospital in Samarkand was emptied of all those who could walk. They were sent to the cotton fields. The money made from the industry goes into the accounts of the country's elite, funding the lavish hotels and office blocks of the Uzbek capital, Tashkent.

The produce of child labour has found a respectable connection in Britain. It is sold on the international market, using the 'rules and facilities and services' of the Liverpool Cotton Association. The LCA rules 'enable the buying and selling of cotton to take place in an equitable manner', said a spokesman. It does not make a profit or act as an exchange where cotton is sold, he added, yet its main income is from the subscription payments that cotton traders make to use its services and arbitration. A senior Western official said about 80 per cent of Uzbekistan's cotton was sold using the LCA structures.

Louise Ellman, Labour MP for Liverpool Riverside, where the LCA is based, said: 'I am extremely concerned and shocked about this use of child labour. I had no idea this was going on, or that there was any connection between this sort of exploitation and Liverpool in the twenty-first century. There should be an investigation through the International Labour Organisation into these conditions, and I shall be discussing this situation with the LCA.'

The president of the LCA, Nick Earlam, said: 'We cannot by our very role interfere in the business of countries or participants. We are there to assist the movement of international cotton across trade boundaries.' He said Uzbekistan provided about 0.05 per cent of the LCA's income.

In 1998 the US State Department said 'forced and bonded labour by children' was not 'known to occur [in Uzbekistan] except for compulsory mobilisation for the cotton harvest'. Since 11 September, Uzbekistan has become the US's new strategic partner in Central Asia, and the State Department does not mention its new best friend's slave labour policy in its notes on the country. US companies are also the main purchasers of Uzbek cotton, an industry source said.

Shamsiddin was playing with his brother, Shakhobidin, 13, outside the village of Shokodon when he spoke to The Observer. 'Work starts for school kids in March,' Shakhobidin said. 'We have to clean the fields for stones then. We plant cotton in May, and then have to clean the fields of weeds.'

Last year was a bad harvest, and Shakhobidin earned only 3,000 soums. He picked five to six kilos every day, getting as little as 10 soums - a half-penny - per kilo. The rough price of a kilo of medium to poor quality raw cotton - bought from a farmer - on today's market is 27p.

Today he and his brother play with their cow, Mishka, and a deflated yellow football. But games have no real place in his life today.

'The authorities are always looking for child labour, as it is the cheapest,' said Talib Yakubov, from the Human Rights Society.