Cotton Rhapsody

Ouvriers au travail dans l'usine de Yavan.

Cotton flowers.

We leave for Yavan at the end of morning. In the Japanese ATV are Antoine, Bertrand, David and Murod. Bertrand is a veteran of the cotton. He worked for years in a multinational company in Paraguay and he is now consultant for anything relating, directly or indirectly, to the ginning factory. Imported from Paraguay in separate pieces, the plant was reassembled at Yavan last year. The site is little away from the former industrial centre located about 70km south-east of Dushanbe. In a neighboring valley, lies Nourek and its mega hydroelectric dam. To irrigate the plateau we are crossing, a canal was digged into the mountain in sixties to bring water from the dam to this side.

Undeterred by its age and the numerous paraguayan years of working, the plant looks like an enclave of modernity in a landscape of fields and villages which seems to have been forgotten by the progress in spite the presence of the electricity, the parabolic dishes and the mobile phones. Its atmosphere made of pulley, belts and gears immerses me into a movie of Chaplin and takes me back in the time of the threshings in my native village. There is a fixed aestheticism in these mechanics. The belts whistle, the chains jingle, and the motors hum. Staccato of the riddles around which millions of flocks are floating. Regular percussions of ghe connecting rods. The plant runs 24 hours a day in this harvest time to obtain the cotton fibre intended for the export. Tractors pulling trailers are waiting outside the gate. They enter one by one, are weighed at the entrance and reweighed at the exit after having spilt their loads on the platforms. The employees are hardworking for feeding the never satisfied ogre who belch out the pure and white, valuable fibre cleared of its dregs. It is then compacted into 200kg bales, wrapped in canvas and marked before storage to wait for the trucks which will carry them to the spinnings. Behind the plant, next to the restaurant, the old tapshan is abandoned. Too much work. I shall, however, manage to lead from the path of duty, for the photo, two young workers, the skin tanned for raking strongly the cotton on the stacks. Some paraguayan technicians came with the plant of which they know all the vagaries. They and the plant are inseparable. It is their mistress.

Une vague structure de ferrailles rouillées, quelques planches, le tapchane derrière l'usine ne sera utilisé que le temps d'une photo.

In the fields around, villagers are picking. The Women fill tirelessly bags which the men then empty in pile before loading on a truck or on a trailer drawn by one of these incredible tractors escaped from the Soviet Museum of Antiques. Pardaboy, a good-natured security guard of the factory, which is also farmer, leads me towards a group of picking women. They are wearing dark clothes, the head wrapped in shawls while the temperature rises above forty degrees. They stop working a moment to show me the bolls which let out seeds and the fibre. Strange and beautiful flower, moving flower linked to a compassion feeling. I wonder about the absence of men.
- Dad spit, answers me a girl, smiling.
Dad sleeps. The picking is painful for the back and for the hands of these women because they must be always the back bent and the bolls are hard and abrasive. Pardaboy pulls me in a reed hut in his field. We share tea and kefir.
- It was better before, he sighs. There were machines for the harvest, tractors. We could travel. Today...
He waves vaguely towards the fields where women are working.

La cueillette du cotton.

The cotton plant in the night.

It is now dusk. In another land plot, an old man and his wife are about to have dinner before spending the night in the middle of their field. A pot steams on a wood fire. The man invites me to take place on a mattress on the ground. We are drinking tea silently. When we leave, the woman fill my bag with a melon and tomatoes. Half-moon, dark mountains on the horizon, rare lights, smothered cries of children. The plant all illuminated is rustling in the middle of this great peace. Surrounded with its white silos and bathed in a halo of twinkling dusts, beating, it is a nocturnal poem, a rhapsody of industrial music.

The cotton production in Central Asia is subject of endless controversies. Associated with the Soviet "good practices", it has been attributed to it the environmental disaster on the Aral Sea, the pollution of soils, the monoculture to the detriment of subsistence crops, the child labor. Contrary to generally accepted ideas, it is not the Soviets who developed the cotton monoculture in Central Asia, but tsarist Russia. The aim was overcoming the deficit of cotton fibre caused by the American Civil War and taking this opportunity to develop, from 1860, a textile industry in the Ferghana. Kokand became the most important cotton wholesale market in Central Asia and its flower became the emblem of the region. The ceramists of Richtan made of it their favorite ornamental pattern. Came to power, the Soviets stepped up the "white gold" growing by using enormous resources. Massive use of fertilizer and pesticides, deployment of a hydraulic infrastructure intended to provide the needed water by extraction from rivers. However, the Aral Sea disaster is not due to the cotton as such but to the way how were built and managed the tanks in the desert zones of Turkmenistan and Uzbekistan, causing an enormous evaporation aggravated by the bad maintenance of the canals which are leaking everywhere.

Today, even if cotton production is increasingly being replaced by subsistence crops, the cotton industry is for Uzbekistan, Turkmenistan and Tajikistan an important factor in the creation of wealth and of economic development. It is true for Uzbekistan which is the largest producer in the region and occupies the sixth rank worldwide but also for the small Tajikistan which has only few exportable resources. Kolkhozes and sovkhozes are gradually dismantled for the benefit of small and average farms which can take the form of cooperatives. The national ginning factories passe in private local hands and the Yavan factory, emanation of a major international group, is an exception. The mechanization is not sufficient and there is a shortage of labour. The young men have gone abroad to get a better income and women get landed with the picking in the country. According to regions, and although that is officially prohibited, the farmers sometimes recruit students, including even children. This practice is fortunately decreasing. The installation of factories like this one of Yavan whith a sustainable development and socially responsible policy and the pressures from NGO are not for nothing in this evolution.

Cotton balls for the spinning mill.

Thanks to Antoine Buisson, assistant director of the Yavan cotton factory for his help in writing this article.


More photos à Yavan