EVERY year about this time approximately 1m people—including teachers, doctors and students—are dumped in Uzbekistan's cotton fields to pick “white gold”. They are taken from their jobs and their schools, sometimes threatened with expulsion or dismissal or physical violence, and compelled to meet quotas to help the government earn some hard cash. These ersatz labourers have not been pushed into the fields indirectly, by poverty, human-rights groups say, but by a quasi-feudal system that benefits an elite. Activists are now worried that a major infusion of international aid might obscure the problem rather than address it.

UNICEF and the World Bank have drafted a $49.9m grant proposal on behalf of Uzbekistan’s government to support education. The funding would come from the Global Partnership for Education (GPE), an umbrella group based in Washington, DC. According to the grant proposal, the aid would help students in rural areas, who are at a disadvantage compared with urban students because they have fewer teachers and resources.

The application does not mention that countless students and teachers in Uzbekistan are missing classes two months a year because they’re tending cotton. Surely the first priority for any reform of the educational system ought to be getting them back into classrooms.

Critics of the new funding plan say UNICEF is bending over backwards to please Uzbekistan’s notoriously repressive government, lest it be kicked out, as other UN agencies and non-governmental organisations have already been. UNICEF has “lost sight of its mandate: preventing forced child labour,” says an American aid worker with over a decade’s experience working on education in the region. In response, UNICEF concedes that “child labour is a major problem for the education system in Uzbekistan,” but emphasises that it is not the only problem.

This is not the first time that aid from abroad has rankled the human-rights groups that campaign against forced labour in the cotton fields. The Asian Development Bank, they argue, should reconsider a promise it made in September 2013, pledging $220m to help Uzbekistan modernise its irrigation system. Any benefits would help primarily the cotton industry, which they hold responsible for the system of forced labour.

The roots of this practice go back to Soviet times, where millions of citizens were routinely sent to help the state work the land. After the collapse of the Soviet Union, Uzbekistan’s farmland was privatised, theoretically. But a lack of substantive reform left the farmers effectively indentured to the state. Local officials tell them how much cotton to grow and forbid them from selling to anyone but the state, at knockdown prices.

Researchers at the School of Oriental and African Studies in London have written one of the most comprehensive studies of the phenomenon. They explain how it is organised from the top. The Uzbekistani state, which sets quotas for each region, sells cotton abroad at global market prices, reaping a hard-currency profit that disappears into opaque accounts. If farmers don’t fulfil their quota, authorities can boot them off the land. But because the farmers cannot afford extra hands, the officials order state employees, including doctors and nurses, and students—in the past including children as young as nine, according to Human Rights Watch—into the fields.

This year America’s state department gave Uzbekistan the lowest ranking on its annual worldwide assessment of human trafficking and forced labour. Its report notes that both children and adults are victims: “The Government of Uzbekistan remains one of only a handful of governments around the world that subjects its citizens to forced labour through implementation of state policy.”

A commercial boycott in recent years has enlisted over 130 apparel retailers to eschew Uzbek cotton. How effective it is, though, is unclear. According to reports in the Russian press, China is eager to purchase half of Uzbekistan’s entire cotton harvest. Bangladesh is already a big buyer. By some estimates, 83% of this year’s harvest may be shipped to those two countries.

There are modest signs Uzbekistan is starting to listen. Last year, the Uzbek-German Forum for Human Rights said, fewer children under 15 were mobilised. But to make up for the shortfall, authorities conducted “an unprecedented mass mobilisation” of teenagers and university students.

After at least seven years of discussions, this year Uzbekistan has allowed in a monitoring mission from the International Labour Organisation (ILO). It is unclear what Uzbek handlers will let them see. Authorities seem unready to talk about the problem; journalists and activists are routinely arrested for getting too close. After reporting on the harvest last month, an independent journalist named Sergei Naumov was arrested on the type of charges authorities often deploy to silence and defame their critics. A woman Mr Naumov says he never met accused him of grabbing her breasts on the street. He was held incommunicado for 12 days, at the height of the harvest. If he hadn’t been, perhaps he could have reported on stories like that of Amirbek Rakhmatov, a six-year-old boy who suffocated under a pile of cotton last month, a few weeks after starting first grade.