GANIRA ALIYEV WORKS IN AN 18-woman team picking cotton in a field 30 minutes outside the town of Bilasuvar in Azerbaijan. She is 33 and has worked in a cotton field for 17 years. She is a wisp of a woman, thin and strong like a band of steel, with hip bones prominent under her jeans. She laughs callously, with a blend of ridicule and joviality. Lines from the Sun are just beginning to form around her eyes, and she has cheekbones reminiscent of Cate Blanchett. She wears jeans that are too short and patched in several places; she wears red socks and ankle-high galoshes over her shoes, a blue polyester shirt with “London” printed across the chest, and a plaid wool headscarf that protects her from the Sun and which she is constantly pulling forward or pushing back on her head. She finds it difficult speaking and picking concurrently, so she often stops to talk. She has a reputation for being the slowest picker in the team and this seems to make the other women giggle rather than scowl at her. They are paid by what they pick individually, so she is probably allowing them to make a little bit more money every day.
Between her legs is a burlap bag tied with nylon cord around her waist. The bag dangles lightly at the beginning of her days and by the end it drags between her legs like a massive bladder. She has agreed to talk to me if I help her to pick and if I wear her bag, thereby freeing her up to pick and wander. She pretty much laughs at me all day. It makes me think of the 1942 children’s novel The Bobbsey Twins in the Land of Cotton. The Bobbsey twins learn how to pick cotton on a plantation owned by their cousin’s family, where they encounter such naturally-occurring phenomena as “singing Negroes”. They sing because “they are happy”, explains Colonel Percy - because the work is “healthful exercise” and because they like him. I assume that the writer didn’t spend much time working in a cotton field.
Ganira has worked in the same field for six years. “We make each other laugh[],” she says. “It’s probably like a hairdresser’s salon. We joke about men.” Then she tells me a common adage in Azerbaijan, which I hear over and over again in versions that vary only slightly. “Men are the head of the house, and women are the neck. But the neck turns the head.” Picking cotton is women’s work in Azerbaijan, as it is in many parts of the world.
It is a brisk fall day. The only sound is the crackling of leaves under our feet. The cotton bolls we pick seem to suck the moisture from my skin. My hands, in little time, are both strangely numb and itchy. Sharp branches poke at my ankles and I can feel a mild ache beginning somewhere in my lower back. Apart from the physical drawbacks, it is mind-numbingly boring.
Cotton fields around the world have a silence, as if the cotton swallows up the sound. It is not a particularly beautiful sight to see vistas of cotton. It is a straggly plant, with dry, brownish leaves and balls of dusty yellowish fluff springing forth sparsely from bare branches. It is impossible for me to look at a cotton field now without seeing the environmental catastrophe that it often represents.
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In Azerbaijan everyone told me that cotton is good for the land and good for the soil. It is not.
Though cotton makes up only about 3 per cent of our global agricultural land, it consumes nearly a quarter of the world’s insecticides and 10 per cent of the world’s pesticides - more than any other crop. The average pair of jeans carries three quarters of a pound of chemicals.
Pesticides, of course, allow for the global cotton empire; but the pests build up a resistance and farmers need ever-increasing amounts of chemicals to combat them. Most of the conventional cotton in the United States is genetically modified. Much of the rest of the world, particularly developing countries, can’t afford the proper safety equipment needed for chemical use, nor do they tend to understand the precautions, which are often written in a foreign language. Ten per cent of fatalities in the agricultural sectors of developing countries come from pesticide poisoning.
In India, more than 17,000 farmers committed suicide in 2003 alone. The majority come from cotton-growing areas, where expensive pesticides and genetically modified seeds have not only not worked for farmers but have left them deeply in debt. The weapon of choice tended not to be a razor or a rope. They swallowed the very pesticides that had, in one way or another, failed them.
Pesticides kill more than 67 million birds in the United States alone each year. The Aral Sea, once the world’s fourth largest body of freshwater, lost 11,000 square miles of water to irrigating Uzbekistan’s cotton fields and is now so polluted from pesticides that it cannot support marine life.
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These days, organic cotton seems to be charting the apparel future. Consumer demand for organics has increased by 35 percent annually, and dozens of brands now offer wholly organic cotton clothing lines, or blended lines - a concept pioneered by Nike, which claims to be the leading buyer of organic cotton for apparel.
Organic cotton, however, is not necessarily a panacea for the dangers of conventional cotton. The associate director of Cotton Incorporated’s agricultural research department claims that organic cotton requires “more labour, more land and more water,” and that using manure as a fertiliser may well pose pollution problems for the environment that are every bit as serious as those from synthetic fertilisers. Advocates of organic cotton don’t necessarily dispute these issues, but the point is to leave, perhaps, the lightest footprint possible on the Earth. In Azerbaijan, every farmer I spoke with was under the peculiar assumption that what grew in his fields was “organic” cotton. While it is probably true that Azeri farmers have a difficult time affording pesticides and insecticides, none of Azerbaijan’s cotton is certified organic and much of what I saw had clearly been treated. The leaves were dying or falling from stalks - often a result of defoliants. The cotton bolls were spilling from their pods - organic cotton tends to hold together in its pod until it is picked. At the end of the day I spent picking cotton my hands were covered in a dusty film.
It is fair to say that cotton fields are among the most schizophrenic of the agricultural community. They need lots of water and lots of sunlight, but not necessarily at the same time and not too much of either or they will die. But the effects of a lifetime of cotton are visible most clearly in the faces of the pickers who work alongside Ganira; they are stooped and aged, missing many of their teeth, and thin as stalks. They work hard and die young.
Ganira and many of her countrymen, however, want not larger fields of cotton, but a textile factory that could give them year-round employment. They want security. “We get paid very little and we work very hard for this so-called freedom,” she says, referring to the breakup of the Soviet Union. “Freedom is good. We need freedom. But life was better then.”
I do not last long in the field and I make Ganira look downright brisk. In the end, I have earned her less than a dime for my efforts. Later, we sit in her house having tea and jam. It is pale pink and built up from the ground so that chickens can live under the house. There are ten people living here and sharing two main sleeping areas. Her father, who is bedridden, lies on one of three mattresses on the floor in a back room and he coughs and coughs. Ganira cannot afford to send him to the hospital and no one knows what’s wrong with him. It occurs to me that he may have brown lung disease.
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At home, Ganira is transformed, as if her personality were a cape she wore only out in the fields. She puts sugar cubes in her mouth and sips her tea, allowing the cubes to disintegrate slowly. She says little, but allows Aliofsat, who is married to the sister of her sister-in-law, to speak for her. While he talks, Ganira wears a thousand-yard stare in the general direction of the unpolished wood floor while her father wheezes and coughs. Later, I offer her a silk scarf from Asia, where I live, and she takes it with a melancholy smile, but seems disinterested. “I wanted a pair of jeans,” she says.
Fugitive Denim A Moving Story of People and Pants in the Borderless World of Global Trade by Rachel Louise Snyder
Norton, £15.99; 288pp