“Agro-Terrorism” in Uzbekistan: Farmers Punished for Planting Onions

In the Shurchi district of Surkhandarya region, around 80 farmers were forced onto buses late at night on October 31, 2025, and brought to a “meeting” with regional officials, escorted by police. “Our fault is that we delayed planting wheat,” said the farmer who sent the video from the bus to local media outlet Kun.uz

In the video, local officials in Surkhandarya can be seen ordering tractors to destroy freshly planted onion fields belonging to the local farmer.

“We’ll destroy what you’ve planted anyway. Then we’ll move on to the next field,” one official says in the video. “Even if you spend 100 or 200 million UZS ($8,300–$16,600), go ahead — plant if you like; we’ll still plow it over. It seems words don’t affect you. We’ve had enough of those farmers who planted onions. Because you planted onions, you didn’t meet the cotton quota. The district has 580 hectares of cotton left unplanted.”

Such scenes of administrative coercion, known as the “allocation system” are reminiscent of Soviet-style command agriculture and have become increasingly visible in recent years despite President Shavkat Mirziyoyev’s public commitments to liberalizing the agricultural sector.

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