Can the stain of forced and child labour be removed from cotton?

Can the stain of forced and child labour be removed from cotton?

SOMETIME AROUND the middle of the 19th century, Maria Sutton Clemments worked as a slave on an Arkansas cotton plantation. Years later she remembered one typically vicious overseer. If her fellow slaves “didn't chop that cotton just right,” she recounted, “he would have them tied up to a stake or big sapling and beat him until the blood ran out of the gashes.”Fast forward around 175 years from that Arkansas scene, and Ruslan Utayev is recalling his own experience of being forced to pick cotton, in Uzbekistan, less than a decade ago. Between September and November, he says, the then president, Islam Karimov, closed Mr Utayev's school and made its children and teachers work the fields. His shift started at 6am and he was expected to pick 100kg of cotton