Abstract:

How are market-oriented reforms transforming everyday labour in rural Uzbekistan? Following 25 years of political isolationism and state-led capital accumulation, in 2016, Uzbekistan opened its economy to global markets by attracting foreign investment through policies such as deregulation, private-public partnerships, special economic zones and intensification of relations with international financial institutions. Over the recent years this significantly transformed Uzbekistan’s agricultural landscape. The formerly state-controlled cotton and wheat farms have been replaced by a mosaic of foreign and local agricultural clusters, private commercial farms and intensive horticulture gardens. Consequently, agricultural labour relations are increasingly dictated by private interests with mixed results. While state-sanctioned forced child labour in cotton has been eliminated in 2021, neoliberal policies are introducing a new set of challenges and opportunities to everyday lives of smallholder producers who supply the bulk of informal seasonal work on large farms. Drawing on twenty semi-structured interviews with smallholders, a female seasonal labourer and two owners of intensive gardens in the Samarkand region, this chapter applies theoretical perspectives from social reproduction and political ecologies of land grabbing to examine a) how intensive gardens transform the labour regimes previously dominated by cotton; and b) the gendered implications of land and water enclosures on social reproduction of the household. The aim is to give voice to those who are navigating these changes and contribute to a growing body of literature on the ambiguous results of state-led privatisation in post-Soviet contexts.