In a tremendous victory for a campaign in which this blog and other political bloggers played a leading part, Tesco have banned Uzbek cotton from all products sold in their stores and instituted supply chain audits to ensure this is enforced. Tesco must be congratulated on their response to the irrefutable proof of the massive use of child labour forced by a totalitarian state. But this is also startling evidence of the potency of activists, bloggers and consumers in the information age.
https://www.craigmurray.org.uk/archives/2005/08/sanctions_again.html
http://disillusionedkid.blogspot.com/2005/09/look-whos-blogging.html
A Tesco executive, Terry Green, stated:
“the use of organised and forced child labour is completely unacceptable and leads us to conclude that whilst these practices persist in Uzbekistan we cannot support the use of cotton from Uzbekistan in our textiles”.
Many congratulations are due to the Environmental Justice Foundation and to People and Planet for their part in the campaign.
Marks & Sparks have made the same commitment now too! (all they have to do now is stop selling illegal produce from Israeli settlements on the West Bank…)
This is a superb result – many many congratulations to all concerned.
For some reason although awareness of sourcing of coffee etc started a few years ago, nobody seemed to give any thought to the cotton in their £2 Primark or Matalan T-shirt, or why it might be so cheap – this despite cotton's central place in the history of slavery in the US South etc. And a couple of short years ago retailers were allowed to get with saying they had no idea and no way of knowing where their cotton was from. Now Tesco say they have put in place verifiable systems to do this. All credit to them (though nobody should forget they remain nasty bastards in all sorts of other areas…)
Newsnight report tonight at http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/programmes/newsnight/7…
I was going to credit the Beeb but they appear to have awarded themselves the plaudit… an only very slightly jarring note that should not affect the huge pat on the back owing to intrepid reporter Simon Ostrovsky
Really good news.
Video coverage by BBC:
http://www.bbc.co.uk/mediaselector/check/player/n…
Official Statement by Embassy of Uzbekistan:
http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/shared/bsp/hi/pdfs/30_10_…
Does anyone know if Topshop have also banned Uzbek cotton? They are claiming to, but I cannot find any real evidence of this. As far as I can see it is only Matalan, M&S, Tescos and Debenhams who have taken this step…