SANGHAR: The sun goes down behind the clouds over a village located close to the 8th-century ruins of Mansura, the first capital of the Arabs in Sindh, which today falls in Sanghar district. I am surrounded by lush green fields of cotton, where the crop is at the picking stage. The ruins of Mansura are in pretty bad shape; during the rains, many people arrived here in the belief that there is gold jewellery to be found.

Farm workers pick cotton, and all means of transport — from donkey- and camel-carts and from tractor trolleys to trucks — are being pressed into use here. Sanghar, I am told, is officially Sindh’s largest cotton-producing district, in a country that ranks eighth in the world in terms of farm output. In terms of cotton production, Pakistan occupies the fourth slot. And within Pakistan, Sindh has an edge over Punjab in terms of higher per-acre yields.

As I make a stopover in Khaskheli village of Jam Nawaz Ali taluka, zamindar Arshad Khaskheli leads me to cotton fields behind his house where a small group of women are briskly picking phutti (seed cotton) in anticipation of the rains. “Let there be no rains, for we will lose our picking which means the loss of a day’s earning,” says one woman. “We earn Rs300 after picking 40kg of cotton in a full day’s labour. If we lose cotton, chilli is the next crop to be picked but it is not grown at as large a scale as cotton is.”

The August rains in the lower Sindh region — known for cotton production — damaged the crop considerably. This means losses of per acre productivity for the landowner and meagre wages to the peasants. “The rains badly hit the quality of the phutti, so ginning-factory owners refuse to buy it,” says the middle-aged Sahibzadi. Husna Khaskheli, pregnant with her fourth baby, works nearby, completely oblivious to the risks of inhaling the residue of insecticides that are used on cotton plants, soil and boll (mass of cotton). “I was recently being treated for tuberculosis but my socio-economic conditions force me to work, otherwise we will not be able to subsist,” she says.

Sahibzadi shows me how her palm is swollen as a result of an insect bite during work. “I can’t use both hands now and have to make do with one hand,” she says. Husna, Sahibzadi and their colleagues bring their children with them to work.

According to the Pakistan Bureau of Statistics data from 2010, there are 4.9 million casual and hired farm workers in Sindh. Of them 1.679 million are women. In addition, in the second category of permanent farm labourers, there are 266,269 workers including 82,546 females. The cotton-pickers I meet mostly fall in the first category. They are not protected by labour laws and qualify for the minimum wages the federal government announces ever year.

“These poor women are illiterate and know nothing about their rights,” explains Javed Soz. “In the absence of an agriculture policy, the farming sector remains by and large ungoverned. So, they are exposed to all sorts of exploitation, be it socio-economic to sexual. Legally, they are informal labour. They are not organised as no law applies to them, especially the law on the fixing of wages.”

The NGO run by Mr Soz conducted a baseline study in 2014 on cotton-pickers’ issues in Matiari, another famous cotton-growing district of Sindh. It is planning to get a cotton-pickers’ union registered with the labour department while invoking provisions of the Sindh Industrial Relations Act (SIRA), 2012.

A lot of blood, sweat and tears go into this labour. With their bodies soaked in sweat, women stay in the fields from dawn to dusk to eke out a miserable living. As cotton is a sensitive crop, it requires massive amounts of pesticide sprays that landowners use to protect it against multiple pest attacks. This renders pickers vulnerable to various diseases and skin allergies. Cotton researchers like Dr Waris Sanjrani of the Central Cotton Research Institute, Sakrand, strongly recommends that agriculture field staff ensure that “sprays stop a fortnight before picking.”

Karamat Ali, a veteran labour rights activist, points out that many chemicals whose use has been banned in other cotton-producing countries are said to be in use in Pakistan. “There is dire need of institutional oversight,” he says, adding that when it comes to the application of the law for the formation of unions by the peasantry, even laws like SIRA 2012 becomes irrelevant in the absence of the explicit definition of rules. The SIRA otherwise says it defines the agriculture and fisheries sector to ensure the right of association. “But without a clear framework of rules, its applicability remains wanting,” Mr Ali says.

Published in Dawn, September 12th, 2017