The Turkmen government backtracked during the 2025 cotton harvest on small steps taken in the previous two years to lesson the usage of forced labor, the Cotton Campaign coalition said in a new report.
Progress on eliminating forced labor is not necessarily linear, and positive developments in one harvest can be unwound the following year without sustained political will and market pressure.
The report – “Turkmenistan Cotton: State-Imposed Forced Labor in the Annual Cotton Harvest, High Risk in Global Supply Chains” – presents the findings of independent civil society monitoring of the 2025 cotton harvest in Turkmenistan by Turkmen.News and Turkmen Initiative for Human Rights. The Progres Foundation also continued to the report.
During the 2023 and 2024 harvest, the Cotton Campaign reported that the Turkmen government took steps to reduce state-imposed forced labor, namely the mobilization of some state employees into the fields.
In their 2025 report, covering the 2024 harvest, the Cotton Campaign said, “Public authorities did not mobilize or extort doctors working in some regional hospitals and teachers working in some schools, although they continued to subject all other groups of state employees to forced labor.”
In the just-released report, covering the 2025, harvest, the Cotton Campaign notes that this small step – not forcing doctors and teachers to pick cotton – had been reversed.
“In the 2025 cotton harvest, the government of Turkmenistan forced all groups of state employees – including teachers and technical staff of schools, doctors and nurses, and employees of utilities organizations and cultural centers – to pick cotton or pay for replacement pickers.”
Turkmenistan is one of the most closed countries in the world. It scrapes the bottom of rankings like Freedom House’s Freedom in the World (with a score of 1 out of 100). Monitoring the cotton harvest is thus a risky endeavor. The involved civil society organizations – Turkmen.News and the Turkmen Initiative for Human Rights – work from exile and monitor the harvest through a network of independent informants inside the country. While the International Labor Organization (ILO) was allowed to conduct monitoring in 2024 and 2025, the Cotton Campaign pointed out that “interference with their monitoring was a persistent challenge during both harvests.”
The Cotton Campaign’s report is expansive, covering not just the realities of forced labor in Turkmenistan’s cotton industry, but how the agricultural sector operates in Turkmenistan, how corruption enables the forced labor system, and how goods produced with forced labor find their way into global supply chains.
Turkmenistan is the 14th largest cotton producer in the world, with significant commercial ties to Turkiye and Pakistan, but also European countries including Bulgaria, Portugal, Italy, and Poland. Turkiye alone imported $96.6 million worth of cotton goods from Turkmenistan in 2024, including yarn, fabric, and cotton fiber, as well as cotton waste. Pakistan imported $33.8 million in cotton goods from Turkmenistan that year.
“It is not only morally, but also legally imperative to eliminate forced labor Turkmen cotton from global supply chains,” the Cotton Campaign stated. The United States, Canada, Mexico, and the EU have enacted laws banning the import of products made with forced labor, and there are discussions in half a dozen other countries – including France, Germany, Norway, the EU, Thailand, South Korea and New Zealand – on similar laws or additional regulations.
Eliminating forced labor requires sustained effort on the part of a government, and unfortunately autocratic governments rarely decide to unravel such systems without external pressure. The example of Uzbekistan is illustrative, as the Cotton Campaign explained:
In Uzbekistan, where the government for decades used systemic forced labor in the harvest, consistent action over years by all stakeholder groups – including UN bodies, policy makers, brands and retailers, and civil society – was essential to pressure the government to reform its system until the elimination of systemic state-imposed forced labor in 2021.
And even that is not quite enough. The risk of forced labor remain present in Uzbekistan given stalling progress when it comes to expanding the rights of workers and continued restrictions on freedom of association and speech, among other issues.
