The World Sanctioned Xinjiang Cotton. China Turned It Into Chicken Feed

Forced labour in Chinese cotton fields can now be linked to the supply chains of KFC and McDonald’s.

“It’ll be fine. As long as we have two hands and a big bag. We'll get this cotton picked in no time. But in the evening, when we get home, only we ourselves know our suffering,” a Uyghur man’s voice says over a video of a dozen people picking cotton by hand in Xinjiang, China.

At one point the young woman filming the video turns the camera on herself: gloves, heavy coat, hat and a face mask. She posted the clip to Douyin — Chinese TikTok. A couple of months later, her reel shows, she moved almost 2,000 miles away to work in a factory in Hubei.

Cotton has long been the focus of international responses to human rights abuses in Xinjiang. About a fifth of the world’s cotton originates from the region. In 2021, US customs banned the import of Xinjiang cotton and anything made with the raw material, such as clothes or shoes.

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But Chinese advances in biotechnology mean Xinjiang cotton is being transformed into animal feed, which food multinationals and some of China’s biggest farmers are using to raise billions of chickens, pigs, cattle, fish and other animals. The breakthrough also helps China reduce its heavy dependence on US imports of protein, strengthening its hand in the rivalry between the two superpowers.

The Bureau of Investigative Journalism (TBIJ) has traced supply chains from Xinjiang all the way to the UK, and to factories that supply major international brands, including KFC and McDonald’s in China.

Some supply chains even involve forced labour and human rights abuses at multiple points. In at least one case, a company sources tainted cotton, makes poultry feed with a sanctioned paramilitary arm of the Xinjiang government, and then slaughters and processes its chickens in a factory using transferred ethnic minority workers.

The cotton sanctions

In the late 2010s, reports began to emerge of the mass detention of Uyghurs and other ethnic minorities in Xinjiang. The internment camps and the forced labour associated with them attracted international scrutiny. Hundreds of thousands of people were sent to work in cotton fields.

“Everyone should strictly abide by disciplinary measures, obey management, work hard to pick cotton, and bring their wages home safely,” Liu Peng, first secretary of a village near Kashgar, announced by megaphone to hundreds of assembled cotton pickers. State media recorded the speech in 2017. “Our work team will definitely visit everyone,” he added.

The US issued a ban on some Xinjiang cotton imports in 2020. It was extended to a region-wide prohibition the following year, resulting in all cotton and tomato products from Xinjiang being confiscated. Then, in 2022, the Uyghur Forced Labour Prevention Act (UFLPA) came into force.

“The UFLPA is the most powerful forced labour law in the world,” said Laura Murphy, a former senior policy adviser to the Biden administration on trade enforcement. “It’s shifted the playing field for corporate transparency and accountability.”

The UFLPA targets goods made in Xinjiang, like cotton, as well as goods made outside of the region but with Xinjiang raw materials, such as in a textile factory. The law also prohibits importers trading with factories that participate in the government labour transfer programme moving ethnic minorities to eastern companies.

In its first three years, US customs has detained more than $3.6bn in goods under the law.

The UN and rights watchdogs say Xinjiang labour transfers are coercive, state-imposed forced labour. A spokesperson for the Chinese embassy in the US said “allegations of ‘forced labour’ in Xinjiang are nothing but vicious lies concocted by anti-China forces.”

Members of all ethnic groups there “enjoy happy and fulfilling lives,” they said, adding that “Xinjiang-related issues are not human rights issues at all, but in essence about countering violent terrorism and separatism.” They said the UFLPA “seriously violates international law and basic norms governing international relations and grossly interferes in China’s internal affairs.”

Children picking cotton

Government programmes in the 2000s saw school children as young as eight sent to the fields each year. Xinjiang millennials on Douyin mourn childhoods spent picking cotton. “Look at this white cotton sea, this used to be my childhood nightmare,” says a Uyghur man walking in a cotton field in one video clip. “Oh, that’s really an unbearable past to look back on.”

Clips uploaded more recently show children are still working Xinjiang’s fields.

One video shows a single mother picking cotton with two young children. The trio harvested 151 kilograms for $21 the previous day, she tells the interviewer. “This video will be a disaster if it spreads abroad,” comments a netizen from the other side of China.

Another, uploaded by a southern Chinese émigré managing a cotton farm, shows three Uyghur boys working in a field in Awat county, southern Xinjiang. Old green and yellow fertilizer sacks dangle from their waists.

A boy in a Mickey Mouse t-shirt pauses to chat. The blue lanyard around his neck has a QR code linked to his Chinese ID that confirms his date of birth: he’s seven. “Smile,” the farmer tells the kid.

Multiple experts said the clips showed child labour law violations, as well as breaches in international conventions. “When I watch videos like these,” said Marcia Eugenio, a child labour expert and former director at the US Department of Labor, “I see exploitation and lost potential. It’s disheartening that young children are put to work in a hot cotton field, looking dejected and tired, instead of being in school or in a playground.”

The Chinese government claimed in 2021 that more than 80% of cotton harvesting was done by machine. But people are still being sent to the cotton fields to pick by hand, argued Adrian Zenz, a leading scholar on Xinjiang. National statistics mask huge regional differences, he said.

A German media investigation in 2021 analysed satellite imagery of 2.7m hectares of Xinjiang cotton plantations and concluded that just over a third of cotton was picked by hand. In the southern Uyghur heartlands, 96% of the crop was handpicked. And southern Xinjiang, said Zenz, “is where the coercion is greatest.”

Turning waste into treasure

For more than 30 years, Beijing has worked to unlock the nutritional benefits of cottonseed. The state has poured billions into agricultural biotechnologies, according to a US government report last year.

For centuries, farmers have used cottonseed meal, a byproduct of cotton harvesting, as feed for adult cattle. But gossypol, a toxin, makes it a risky business for most other animals, including humans; it can cause infertility, stomach bleeding, heart failure and death.

Recent Chinese advances in biotechnology have changed this. Microbes are now used to detoxify cottonseed in fermentation tanks, and “turn waste into treasure,” as the website of Xinjiang Shipu Biotechnology puts it.

Last year, another feed source came to market when — after 14 years of research — a group in Xinjiang figured out how to ferment cotton straw into feed using “special bacteria” and other ingredients, including tomato skin residue.

These are important developments in the nation’s drive for food security. China consumes more meat than anywhere else in the world, and securing protein-rich ingredients for animal feed, like cottonseed, is seen as vital by Beijing.

The country is the world’s biggest soybean importer, and bought more than $15bn-worth from the US in 2023. This dependence is seen as a threat to national food security. In recent years, China has been discreetly stockpiling feed ingredients. Local governments and industry have been told to reduce their use of soybean and corn in livestock feeds and adopt alternatives.

Chinese state media claims that cottonseed meal has the potential to “completely replace” soybean feed. The domestic market, worth $4.1bn in 2023, is projected to grow to almost $7bn by 2028, claims state media.

The cottonseed processing industry is centred in Xinjiang, where 90% of China’s cotton grows. The top player is Chenguang Biotech Group, which processes more than $700m-worth of cottonseed annually through a Xinjiang-based subsidiary. In August 2023, the US sanctioned Chenguang Biotech under the UFLPA, after the company’s marigold and chilli pepper farming in Xinjiang was linked to forced labor.

Chenguang, alongside other Xinjiang biotech companies, supplies cottonseed to many of China’s leading food companies. Yihai Kerry, a feed producer linked to Archer Daniels Midland, one of the world’s four leading grain giants, is a customer.

Other buyers include the largest poultry producer in Asia, and second-largest pig farmer in the world, Wen’s Food Group; the top aquatic feed producer Guangdong Haid; and the Thai multinational Charoen Pokphand (CP). Chenguang, Yihai Kerry, Archer Daniels, Guangdong Haid, Wen’s Food Group and CP didn’t respond to requests for comment.

Forced labour from fields to factories

CP, one of the world’s biggest producers of animal feed, shrimp, poultry and pork, benefits from the labour transfer scheme. It’s the largest private company in Thailand, where it was founded by two Chinese immigrants, and has invested billions of dollars in China.

CP sells animal feeds containing cottonseed meal to farmers across China. Several of CP’s operations in Xinjiang are partnerships with the government, including its feed mill in Urumqi, the regional capital. The site is a joint venture with the Xinjiang Production and Construction Corps (XPCC), a state-owned enterprise and paramilitary organisation sanctioned by the US government. It produces feed for chicken, pigs, fish, cattle and sheep. XPCC didn’t respond to requests for comment.

During the COVID-19 pandemic, state media wrote that the government transferred “more than 240 young people from southern Xinjiang” to companies in the north including the Urumqi mill, as part of a “timely rain” of government assistance.

Evidence from social media and official reports also shows the Chinese government sending Xinjiang workers to at least one CP factory outside of Xinjiang. Hubei CP, which supplies chicken to McDonald’s and KFC in China, has taken transfer workers since at least 2019. TBIJ found that almost two dozen Uyghurs posted videos from the plant between 2022 and 2024.

McDonald’s declined to comment on the record, while KFC didn’t respond to requests for comment.

One worker, Ehmet*, travelling to Hubei CP in September 2022 posted footage of lush hills racing past a train window. He added a popular audio clip uploaded by Uyghurs working at factories across the country: “What separates us from our parents and our home, leaves us in a lifetime of regret and lures us into slavery? Yes, money.”

In January the next year, Ehmet filmed himself on his dormitory bunk bed, mouthing the words to another borrowed clip: “A person who suffered a lot in his life wrote in his diary: ‘The biggest change in me these days is that I have less to say’.”

TBIJ’s investigation identified seven other chicken plants — located in Liaoning, Shandong, Hubei and Tianjin — participating in Xinjiang labour transfers, from as early as 2015 in one case. CP and Taiwan’s Dachan Foods were the largest businesses operating these plants. Combined, the two slaughter almost a billion chickens each year. And both supply chicken to the Chinese arm of KFC, among other global brands.

CP also has a UK subsidiary, Westbridge Foods, which says it imports chicken, duck and fish from the group’s China business. It in turn supplies chicken to KFC in the UK, as well as Tesco, Sainsbury’s, Asda, ALDI and Iceland.

It’s unclear if chicken or other animal products supplied to UK businesses had been fed Xinjiang cotton, although several retailers said they weren’t supplied poultry processed at Hubei CP. Trade records show in recent years Westbridge has imported thousands of shipments of chicken from CP in Thailand. Some retailers claimed that they either didn’t buy chicken fed with Xinjiang cotton or didn’t buy chicken from China at all. But none responded to questions about their exposure to other meats, seafood and dairy raised on feed containing Xinjiang cotton.

CP, Westbridge Foods, Asda and Iceland didn’t respond to questions. Tesco, Sainsbury’s and ALDI referred TBIJ to the British Retail Consortium, a trade association, whose sustainability policy adviser Sophie De Salis said retailers “are committed to respecting human rights and upholding high welfare standards for people in their supply chains,” conduct due diligence, and investigate and address issues they find.

“Modern slavery is often hidden from view, exacerbated by systemic issues and obscured by complex global supply chains,” De Salis added.

Track and trace

McDonald’s website proudly claims that, in 2023, 100% of the soy used in poultry feed for its chickens was deforestation free. KFC aims to achieve the same across Europe by 2030. The moves are responses to EU legislation that comes into effect later this year.

Neither chain responded to questions about whether Xinjiang cotton was fed to chickens or other animals served in their restaurants.

CP has faced similar challenges in the past. The company tried to eliminate the use of forced labour in its Thai seafood production. Shrimp it was selling were being raised with fishmeal, made from fish The Guardian said were caught using forced labour. CP acknowledged the problems and established an organisation to track the feed ingredients alongside its partners and even competitors.

To comply with international laws and detect Xinjiang cotton in their textile supply chains, some brands have turned to forensic testing companies like GenuTrace. Examining isotope ratios reveals a “fingerprint,” said the company’s CEO MeiLin Wan. This fingerprint can then be used to verify where the cotton in a product was grown. Before founding GenuTrace, Wan worked on research, published last year, that showed about a fifth of goods sold by retailers across the world contained cotton grown in Xinjiang.

But while such testing could identify where processed cottonseed meal had come from, Wan said, once it was mixed into animal feed the other ingredients, such as corn, would obscure the cotton fingerprint.

Tracking this problem will rely on more traditional food industry methods. CP reports publicly on its efforts to ensure its corn, soybean, palm oil, fishmeal and cassava are traceable. Cotton, however, isn’t on that list.

“The key is to be close to where the raw materials are being sourced and converted,” said Wan, who has worked with cotton farmers in countries like Egypt and Australia. For international companies, Xinjiang is a difficult place to even visit, let alone conduct checks. Sourcing from the area, she said, is “a really major red flag. And it doesn’t require a consultant to tell you that.”

*Name has been changed

Correction: This article was updated on May 30, 2025, to correct the year that the US customs ban on all Xinjiang cotton came into force from 2020 to 2021.

Thumbnail photo caption: Cotton in Turpan, Xinjiang. Image by yuzu2020/Shutterstock. China, 2021.