When autumn settles in the rolling cotton fields in Xinjiang Uygur Autonomous Region and the fluffy snowy flowers burst out of their shells, the cotton harvest season arrives. For farmers like Wu Caixia, a resident of Linze County in northwestern Gansu Province, it is time to embark on their journey to the cotton fields in Xinjiang.

Wu and her husband make a living by growing two thirds of a hectare of corn in their hometown, which yields an annual income of about $1,450. Her husband also works as a construction worker here and there, bringing in another $400. Last autumn, the couple spent two months in Xinjiang picking cotton, making $700, which boosted their family savings and self-confidence. With this money, the couple bought a refrigerator, a DVD player, an electric fan; the remaining was set aside for social security for their parents and tuition fees for their child.

White gold

Located in the northwest corner of China, Xinjiang Uygur Autonomous Region is blessed with a cotton-friendly climate. Xinjiang is the largest cotton-growing region in China, producing about 40 percent of the country's cotton in 2007. Statistics from the China Cotton Association (CCA) show that the national gross output of cotton reached 6.73 million tons during the 2006/07 cotton season and is estimated to be 7.5 million tons in 2007/08. Cotton production and related industries have become a backbone of Xinjiang's economy, generating one sixth of the local gross domestic product (GDP).

"And when the cotton balls get rotten, you can't pick very much cotton," an English nursery rhyme says. Cotton growers in Xinjiang understand it too well. If cotton is not picked in time, it is wasted in the field.

Labor is abundant in China, but not in Xinjiang during the cotton harvest season. With an area four times the size of California, Xinjiang accounts for one sixth of the total landmass of China and a little over 1 percent of the total population. While rich coastal cities frown upon the influx of rural migrant workers, cotton growers there have to compete fiercely for scarce labor resources. During the cotton harvest season, Yang Huowa, a cotton grower in Xinjiang frequents the local railway station to recruit farmers. "From dawn to dusk, I crane my neck for migrant labors, yelling at the top of my voice to attract their attention. As soon as I see one, I lobby him to work on my farm. In addition to a regular wage, I offer them perks such as delicious free meals." On one unlucky day, he only managed to recruit four farmers. Yang planted about 15 hectares of cotton. Due to labor shortages, in one year, his cotton was still swaying in the field when snow blanketed the ground in winter.

In 2007, Xinjiang attracted about 1 million farmers from other inland provinces of China, half of whom were from the neighboring Gansu Province. These migrant farmers picked most of the cotton produced in Xinjiang, earning a total of 2 billion yuan ($0.27 billion) in two months or so. The majority of migrant farmers are women. To ladies such as Wu Caixia, cotton-picking is no more onerous than other fieldwork. They have time to spare in autumn anyway. Cotton-picking not only brings them off-budget revenue but also provides a rare chance to see the world outside their hometown.

Cotton picker economics

We can hardly talk about cotton pickers without mentioning the textile and apparel industry. The textile industry is a labor-intensive industry that offers employment opportunities to a large number of low-skill workers. Many countries used to impose quota and tariffs on textile imports to protect their own industry. The Multifiber Agreement (MFA), signed in 1974, restricts international competition in the industry with bilateral quotas. Under the MFA, the total textile exports from an exporting country cannot exceed a certain share of total imports in the country of destination. In 1995, the MFA was replaced by the World Trade Organization (WTO) Agreement on Textiles and Clothing (ATC), which set procedures for the phasing out of MFA quotas by 2005. Since the expiration of MFA in 2005, clothing products are no longer subject to quotas under a special regime outside normal WTO/GATT (The General Agreement on Tariffs and Trade) rules. China entered the WTO in 2001, which granted China increased access to international market. Many foreign apparel companies such as Nike, JC Penney, and Adidas have outsourced production to Chinese companies.

Now, China has a very large textile industry that captures a large share of the global market. The industry gobbles up millions of tons of cotton each year. The migrant farmers working in Xinjiang's vast cotton fields are part of the global supply chain of textile and apparel. Demand for these farmers and the wages offered to them are associated in some sense to how much clothing shoppers buy in stylish stores lining the streets of cities such as Beijing, Shanghai, New York and Paris, and how much cotton is produced on the plantations outside of Xinjiang. The number of migrant farmers picking cotton in Xinjiang each year has increased from about 10,000 a decade ago to 1 million now.

The globalization of the textile industry is illustrated by Pietra Rivoli, a business professor with Georgetown University. In her book The Travels of a T-Shirt in the Global Economy, Professor Rivoli traced the fascinating journey of a t-shirt around the globe and the politics involving each leg of the shirt's journey. Professor Rivoli learned that the t-shirt she bought for six dollars was woven with cotton planted on a farm around Lubbock, Texas. Further investigation led her to a factory in Shanghai, China, where the cotton from Texas was spun and woven into cloth. The cloth was cut and sewn into a t-shirt, and then was shipped back to the United States, where it was bought by Professor Rivoli.

"We are moving away from an economic system in which national markets are distinct entities, isolated from each other by trade barriers and barriers of distance, time and culture and toward a system in which national markets are merging into one huge global marketplace," she said.

In 2005, Thomas L. Friedman, a foreign affairs columnist for The New York Times identified 10 factors that have leveled the global playground, including the fall of the Berlin Wall, the rise of information technology and new business models such as outsourcing and offshoring.

Although China is the world's largest cotton producer now, domestic supply still falls significantly behind ballooning demand fueled by the growing textile industry. The world cotton price is lower than the domestic price due to the higher production efficiency of foreign farmers and subsidies from their governments. According to the U.S. Cotton Council, from 2004 on, about half of cotton consumed in China was from imports, and about one-half of China's imported cotton was from the United States, with the rest is from West Africa, the former Soviet Union and Australia.

Traditionally, cotton in China was primarily produced by Chinese farmers along the Yellow River. The fields were patchy and production costs were high. In 2004, the government began to subsidize grain crop farmers in 13 major grain-producing provinces in east and central China (farmers in western provinces are not covered because they are not located in the major grain belt), according to a U.S. Department of Agriculture study authored by Fred Gale, Bryan Lohmar and Francis Tuan. This was the first time that the Chinese Government had offered direct subsidies to farmers.

After the turn of this century, China's agriculture accounted for only 15 percent of GDP and 5 percent of tax revenue. China's WTO accession renders farmers vulnerable to global competition. The government decided to end the century-old agricultural tax and introduced direct subsidies. The amount of subsidies varies across regions and across crop types. The subsidy enticed many cotton growers in China's heartland to shift to grain production. Foreign cotton took up half of the cotton market in China. In 2004, Xinjiang had a bumper harvest of cotton, yet cotton growers suffered from declining cotton prices and a shortage of migrant cotton-picking farmers. Their woes were exacerbated by dwindling demand from cotton mills. High cotton prices the previous year forced some mills to close down and others to reduce capacity.

Recent booms in the textile and cotton market gave birth to the spectacular phenomenon of migrant cotton pickers. Year after year, like migrant birds taking wing in the autumn wind, cotton-picking farmers embark on their journey to the vast cotton fields in Xinjiang, harvesting a better life.

The market has a cool head and a cold heart when picking losers and winners. Recently, Xinjiang cotton growers acquired another helper, the cotton-picking machine. Each machine can pick as much cotton as 600 farmers, at a cost of 0.4 yuan ($0.05) per kg of cotton, 60 percent lower than the labor cost of human cotton pickers. How this will affect the landscape of the cotton fields of Xinjiang is a question for tomorrow.