Just to clarify - child labour in Uzbekistan is state-orchestrated, not some benign issue about family livelihoods. Children are forced into the fields because the government has soviet-style cotton production quotas, which have resulted in adults unable to make a living wage from working in the annual cotton harvest. So the result is that schools are closed for months each harvest and children - as young as 7 - are bussed out to the cotton fields to pick their daily quota of cotton, for which the luckiest amongst them can earn a few pence per day (many are not paid at all). All under the watchful gaze of the police and local security system. There is no question of people starving if a boycott of Uzbek cotton takes place - what it means is international pressure on a brutal regime to liberalise cotton production, so that it supports rural livelihoods, rather than undermining them. Let's not forget that the regime is responsible for brutal repression adn human rights abuses, corruption, and, as we appraoch the 3rd anniversary: the massacre of hundreds of civilians in Andijan in May 2005. Uzbekistan is under a dictatorship - think Zimbabwe, Tibet and Burma and you're on the right tracks. As a consumer do you want to directly feed the coffers of this abhorrent regime? Encourage your retailers to do more than H and M seem willing to do, and demand - as Tesco, Marks and Spencer and C & A have done - that the supply chain is free from forced child labour. Show your support and tell these 3 companies why you applaud their efforts to improve cotton production for people and their environment. check out www.ejfoundation.org for more.