CHINAZ (Uzbekistan): For Buribek, like for many Uzbek farmers, growing cotton is a dangerous affair. “Being a cotton farmer here is like hanging between life and death,” he said, resting his chin on the handle of his hoe and gazing at hectares of cotton fields stretching towards a hazy horizon.

“The government controls our lives very tightly. If we don’t obey, we’ll end up in trouble,” he said. “All we want is freedom, and the state is punishing us for wanting freedom.” The arid Central Asian country, one of the least open former Soviet states, is the world’s second-biggest cotton exporter.

But half a century since Moscow’s central planners launched cotton monoculture in Uzbekistan — with massive irrigation virtually draining the Aral Sea as a result — farmers are still subject to severe Soviet-style regulations and penalties. They are banned from buying their own land and have to sell cotton to the government at fixed, below-market prices.

Planting and picking cotton, still done by hand, remain a nationwide struggle, with children, students and women from all over the country being drafted in to help every year. Farmers are allowed to lease plots from big Soviet-style collective farms, but can be stripped of their allotments if they fail to fulfil state output quotas.

And with President Islam Karimov controlling agriculture and trade almost as harshly as he does political dissent, most farmers are reluctant to discuss their hardships. Some of those who resist get arrested, farmers say.

“I’ve heard of many farmers who ended up in real trouble. I don’t want to talk about it. Of course we are afraid,” said Buribek, squinting in bright sunshine, his headscarved wife and daughter turning over the soil nearby.

“But we Uzbeks are settled and hardworking, and we love our land. We are never going to abandon it, and the government knows that too. That’s why it feels it can do anything to us.”

Some farmers fear that this month’s bloody suppression of a rebellion in the eastern Ferghana Valley, where many big cotton farms are based, may herald further curbs on economic liberties in the mainly Muslim country of 26 million.

Witnesses say around 500 people were gunned down by troops at a protest in the town of Andizhan. The Uzbek government has said only 169 people died, mostly “terrorists”. “Farmers, like any businessmen, like stability. Although we do want change, we don’t want bloodshed,” said Akhmedulla, a farmer in his 50s who runs an 8-hectare allotment near the fishing town of Chinaz on the Syr Daria river.

“I would much rather live in a scary but stable environment than in a state of civil war,” said Akhmedulla, who, like all farmers interviewed, refused to give his last name. While other ex-Soviet states have pushed ahead with market reform, the Uzbek government has imposed ambitious production targets while paying depressed prices.

Although Uzbekistan enjoyed a rich cotton harvest last year, thanks to favourable weather conditions, the 2003 crop of 2.86 million tonnes was the nation’s worst in decades. This year it has set a higher target of 3.6 million tonnes.

Farmers said large farms and agriculture officials, fearful of punishment for not fulfilling quotas, often inflated numbers. John Wakeman-Linn, head of the International Monetary Fund’s mission to Uzbekistan, has called on the Uzbek government to allow farmers to grow and sell whatever they felt was necessary under given market circumstances.

“This would be key to improving living standards in the rural areas,” Wakeman-Linn said this month. Sanjar Umarov, a Tashkent-based cotton businessman, said obsolete cotton processing meant the quality of Uzbek cotton was deteriorating and becoming unpopular on the global market.

“The industry is rotting,” said Umarov, who has been in the cotton business since 1992.

“A lot of countries refuse to buy Uzbek cotton because it’s badly processed. We desperately need investment to upgrade the sector, but the government fears that private investors would take the lucrative industry away from it.”

Karimov’s government has promised to gradually dismantle Soviet-style collective farms and allow private land ownership. But farmers are sceptical about any change.

Karima, her weather-worn face wrapped in a bright headscarf, earns the equivalent of $50 a month for weeding fields belonging to a local collective — $20 above the national average wage.

“During the sowing campaign our backs hurt because we have to do so much weeding. During harvesting, our hands are covered in blood because cotton buds are spiky,” she said, resting with her female co-workers on the edge of a giant field.

“We know that there is no end to this. Be it Karimov or anybody else, our backs will still hurt and our hands will still be covered in our own blood.”—Reuters