Uzbekistan’s cotton harvest exceeds 5 million tonnes, president says

Uzbekistan’s cotton harvest has exceeded 5 million tonnes, President Shavkat Mirziyoyev announced on 4 November. The harvest is still growing and is a record since the country became independent in 1991, Eurasianet said. The 2025 harvest totaled just under 4 million tonnes.

Mirziyoyev said machines gathered about 85% of this year’s crop. He expects cotton farmers to receive about $1.17 billion in net profit.

Production methods and water use

The president credited digital tools and drones with contributing to the harvest and said better planning had reduced planting and harvesting costs by about 50%. He also said water-saving technology had halved the water used to grow cotton compared with the 1990s.

Cotton yields have improved almost threefold in recent years. Farmers sowed 1.4 million hectares with cotton in 2000; Mirziyoyev said the area under cotton is now about 38% smaller than at the start of the century.

Eurasianet reports that cotton-sector earnings ranged from $1.4 billion to $1.6 billion in the late 1990s and were around $1 billion in the early 2010s. Annual earnings have since exceeded $3 billion.

Changes to cotton production and labor

During the Soviet era and much of the first two decades after independence, public-sector workers, including doctors and teachers, and students were compelled to pick cotton. Mirziyoyev became president in 2016 and pursued a program aimed at mechanization, better management and more efficient state subsidies.

A presidential decree liberalized the cotton market in March 2020, ending state regulation of production and prices and mandatory sales plans from the 2020 harvest. In 2022, the International Labour Organization said Uzbekistan had eradicated systemic forced labor and systemic child labor during the 2021 cotton production cycle.