Each year tens of thousands of children and students see their schools close for weeks on end while they are forced, by their Government, into fields to harvest Uzbekistan’s cotton.

Picking the ripe cotton buds and carrying the heavy sacks of cotton is back-breaking work, undertaken during the harvest season which begins in the heat of the Uzbek summer and can end at the onset of a freezing winter.

Children are transported by bus or truck to the fields each day but the older amongst them can spend the harvest season living in appalling barrack-style conditions in improvised farm buildings, or, ironically, in outlying school buildings.

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