Several years ago a textile mill executive was extolling the virtues of hand-picked cotton from Ecuador. The problem, he said, was he just couldn't find enough of it.

He may still be searching - Ecuador produces 21,000 bales annually. But if the search proves fruitless, perhaps his company can buy cotton from Uzbekistan - if it can stand the glare of world opinion.

By Lydia Polgreen

The people who toil in the tin ore mine here are links in a long, global chain that reaches all the way to the cellphones and digital music players so ubiquitous in modern life.

At the very bottom of that chain, hunched beneath the blasting sun in a deep red gash near the base of a mountain, a 15-year-old named Imani Mulumeo Derwa sifted through ochre-colored earth this summer with his slender fingers.

Despite signing two international treaties and adopting domestic legislation prohibiting the use of child labor, Uzbekistan continued to rely on a "state-orchestrated mass mobilization of children to bring in the 2008 cotton harvest," a new report has found.

By the end of September, with the pace of cotton collection lagging way behind harvest projections, officials in some areas ordered students as young as first graders into the fields, according to the report prepared by the International Labor Rights Forum (ILRF) and issued November 11.

By Chris Nelson

WASHINGTON – More than a decade after the international sporting-goods industry pledged to take steps toward ending the use of child labor in the production of soccer balls, it appears those efforts have paid off – but not in the way that human-rights groups envisioned.