White gold

New Internationalist, June, 2007 by Alexandra Murrell

Re: Cotton--I was surprised there was no mention of White Gold: The True Cost of Cotton, the Environmental Justice Foundation's report on Uzbekistan's cotton industry (available on their website www.ejfoundation.org).

I was also surprised by how little you wrote about the use of child labour in the cotton industry which is quite a problem in Uzbekistan and Tajikistan. Many Uzbekis go to Kyrgyzstan and Kazakhstan to pick cotton, due to higher wages. The use of children is not widely known: the cotton goes to Russia and is then resold for weaving to other countries.

In addition the large amount of pesticide used has made soil less fertile and hard to grow other crops. In Central Asia, unlike India and West Africa, there is no growing of organic cotton, a preferable alternative for its better wages and healthier working conditions.

One further point--it was linen made from flax that Romans used to make their garments, not cotton.

Alexandra Murrell London, England