The document is Turkmenistan's reply to the committee's list of issues on its third periodic report under the covenant, symbol E/C.12/TKM/RQ/3, some 30 pages in the Russian version the desk read. It answers the committee's numbered questions in turn, and the answers on climate, water, employment, cotton and forced labour are the ones that matter for the region.
The climate answer is unusually candid for Ashgabat. Over the last 55 years the country has warmed by 1.4 degrees, faster than the planet as a whole, and the state's own regional scenarios put the rise by 2100 at between 2 and 3 degrees in the optimistic case and 6 and 7 in the pessimistic one, against a 1990 baseline. Then the line turkmen.news quoted: drought carries the greatest threat, or risk, to the country's socio-economic welfare, brought on by high temperatures and a deficit of water. A marked tendency to more frequent low-water years is observed on the main rivers, the Amu Darya and the Murghab, the filing adds.
The water arithmetic follows. Farming is 95% based on artificial irrigation; about 90% of the country's water resources go to irrigated agriculture; a switch from traditional to drip or sprinkler irrigation saves 30 to 40% of the water. The filing gives no figure for the area already under drip or sprinkler, and none for the area still watered the old way. Agriculture also accounts for about 12% of the country's greenhouse-gas emissions, a share the document says is growing.
Two tables count the people. Agriculture, forestry and fishing employed 43.7% of the employed population in 2022 and 42.5% in 2023. By gender, the sector held 48.0% of employed women in 2023 and 45.0% in 2024, against 17.9% and 17.4% of men.
The cotton answer, item 25 in the reply, is where the two halves of the document meet. It opens with the industry's modernisation and its raw-material base, and then states the projection: the expected rise in temperature will speed the melting of the glaciers that feed the Amu Darya, which may raise the demand for irrigation water, and by 2050 this may lead to a substantial deficit of water resources in the basin, with a serious negative effect on the yield of key crops, cotton among them. The next heading is the short-term outlook, and its first line is an increase in cotton output: in 2025 the president instructed the government to ensure the required volumes of cotton on the basis of rational use of land, water, machinery and fertiliser, with the government's own website as the citation.
The two lines meet in one document, a heading apart. The medium term promises deeper processing and new textile complexes in Mary, Dashoguz and Lebap provinces. The long term promises new varieties bred with international institutes, automated watering, drip systems that are being introduced, and integrated pest management; China is named as the example of cooperation, a country where scientists study modern agro-technologies, irrigation methods and pest control. What the section does not contain is a water budget for the cotton plan, a hectare figure for drip irrigation, or a tonnage for the crop the president ordered.
The state's other answer to the deficit is price. From the 2024 harvest the government more than tripled its procurement prices for cotton, the reply says, citing the presidential resolution that raised them as economic stimulation of the growers' diligent labour: medium-staple cotton from 1,365 to 1,500 manat a tonne, where it had stood since 2019, to 4,550 to 5,000, depending on the picking period; fine-staple from 1,820 to 2,000 to 6,100 to 6,700. Hand-picked raw cotton delivered under the state order is priced at 1 manat a kilogram, 1.20 for fine-staple. What the picker is paid per kilogram is a different number: the reply says an International Labour Organization wage specialist visited two regions in December 2024 to collect the data for a recommendation on it, and gives no figure.
The two lines meet in one document, a heading apart.
On forced labour the reply is categorical. No complaints of forced labour reached the labour ministry or the employment offices in the reporting period, it says, and none reached the courts in 2020 to 2024. Under the roadmap of cooperation with the ILO for 2024 and 2025, the ministry added the occupations of cotton picker and cotton grower to the list of jobs closed to anyone under 18; seminars were held for local officials and residents on keeping children out of the harvest; and in 2025, the reply says, these measures took Turkmenistan off the short list of states whose cases the ILO examines in detail under Convention 105.
Against that stands a single channel. Azatlyk reported on 8 September, in Turkmen, that state employees were told to pay their supervisors 100 to 200 manat or hire a live-in substitute picker at 600 to 1,000 manat for a ten-day rotation, with pickers paid 40 to 50 manat a day. No second channel has confirmed it, and the desk carries it as one report. The reply's line on complaints and Azatlyk's line on substitutes describe the same fields, a season apart.
The harvest itself is the calendar. On 7 September the president heard five governors and set the cotton picking for 9 September, with wheat sowing alongside and no plan tonnage. By 18:25 Ashgabat time on Wednesday the government's site had posted up to number 109823, the day's items being the C5+1 secretariat, the foreign minister's meetings with the French and EU ambassadors, a reception for Tajikistan's anniversary and an item on state support for Akhal-Teke breeding. No harvest-start post, and no readout of a Cabinet sitting for 4 or 7 September. The desk treats the absence as a lag in the record, not as a decision.
The 2050 deficit the reply warns of is being allocated now, by other governments. Afghanistan's Qosh Tepa canal is designed to draw 9 to 11 cubic kilometres a year from an Amu Darya whose mean flow above the Karakum canal is 62, by the Interstate Coordination Water Commission's figures, and Tajikistan's Rogun reservoir will hold and release the river on its own turbines' schedule. CAW's longread on the upstream, published on Wednesday, sets out that arithmetic. Turkmenistan sits downstream of both, and has now told a treaty body, in writing, what it fears the river may do to its main crop.
The candour has a use for the state that offers it. A committee reviewing economic and social rights reads the drought line as the explanation for what a state cannot deliver; the same document's cotton section reads it as a reason to grow more cotton with less water per hectare and a higher price per tonne. Both readings are the government's own, a heading apart, and the document does not price the gap between them.
Two numbers would close it, and Ashgabat has published neither: the water the 2026 cotton plan draws, against the water the state expects the river to carry, and the hectares under drip irrigation, against the hectares still watered the old way. The committee's review is still to come, on a date the desk has not established; the harvest it will be reviewing started, on paper, on Wednesday.