In September the Prime Minister of Uzbekistan was scheduled to drive through a small village in that country. Into insure that all was beautiful and right with the world the local farmers were ordered to glue the just picked cotton back onto the bushes.
When word came that the Uzbek prime minister would be driving past their village, local officials wanted to impress him with roads lined by snowy white fields of cotton.
The only problem was that the cotton had already been picked.
So, locals say, farmers were told to glue cotton balls back on the bushes to give an impression of a bountiful harvest of the country’s most important crop.
Ahead of the expected visit by the prime minister, Shavkat Mirziyaev, at the end of September, some 400 men and women in the village of Shaharteppa in Ferghana province were reportedly pressed into service along the main road where the official convoy was expected to pass.
“Some of them were applying glue inside the bolls and others were putting cotton on the bolls, while another group was attaching cotton capsules onto stalks in the front rows of the cotton field,” a resident, who spoke on condition of anonymity,told RFE/RL’s Uzbek Service.
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