FERGANA VALLEY, Uzbekistan -- The small, wiry child with the leathery hands of an old man trudges out of the cotton field with a stuffed sack on his head that is as big as he is.


He throws it down at the side of the road with a grunt and he grins. Another day done in the annual harvest, and soon schools will be open again.


"Studying is better than picking cotton. In school we can get knowledge," says Danior, 11, his face turning serious under a riot of brown hair, bleached almost blond by the Central Asian sun.


But cotton, he adds quickly, is more important. "It's white gold."


Cotton is much more than a crop in Uzbekistan. It is savior and scourge: the richest cash cow, as well as the most painful symbol of Soviet colonialism, in the now independent Central Asian nation.


The cotton harvest is an all-out, Soviet-style mobilization every fall that closes classrooms for weeks, empties army barracks and calls up even children like Danior, who by law are not supposed to be doing such physical labor.


He does get paid -- about enough to buy school supplies. The harvest, in fact, provides extra income for many of Uzbekistan's 22 million people.


Soviet leaders turned Uzbekistan into a giant cotton farm, doing tremendous environmental and economic damage with a virtual one-crop economy.


Pesticides fouled the water and soil and are blamed for many health problems. The chemicals, and the diversion of rivers to irrigate more and more land for cotton, are chief culprits in the shrinkage and death of the Aral Sea.


Uzbekistan was among the poorest and least educated republics of the Soviet Union, and its heavy reliance on cotton has made it more difficult to develop a balanced economy three years into independence.


"Cotton was supposedly our national pride, yet it was really a yoke that brought our people nothing but poverty, untold torment and suffering," President Islam Karimov told lawmakers in a speech in September.


Karimov wants to diversify the economy, cut irrigated acreage and turn over more land to grain. But he needs the hard currency from cotton as he tries slowly to phase in open-market reforms.


A former communist boss, Karimov says he is postponing democracy until he gets the economy in order. The cult of cotton continues under his authoritarian rule.


Monuments to cotton dominate central squares in Tashkent. A cotton-flower motif is common on bathroom tiles and as an ornament on apartment buildings.


During the harvest, traffic is stopped in cities across the country while police escort busloads of pickers to and from the fields. White mountains of plucked cotton sit alongside highways, as big as circus tents.


On the nightly news, harvest figures for each region scroll up the screen.


"When I was little they did this, now they do it, and probably they'll always do it," Hursand Darmon, a retired engineer in his 50s, said as he watched the televised scorecard one night at a friend's house.


Cotton exports brought the nation about $570 million in 1993. That was 80 percent of the export earnings for Uzbekistan, which also has oil and gold reserves and used to be the Soviet Union's top producer of fruits and vegetables. Agriculture provides full-time jobs for four of every 10 adults.


The latest cotton harvest is expected to total 3.9 million tons, down from 4.2 million in 1993. The country is the world's second-largest cotton exporter, after the United States, although the quality of the crop, officials admit, must be improved to compete in new markets.


At the same time, Karimov has promised to cut back on heavy use of pesticides, which have poisoned drinking water and also food, because cottonseed is virtually the only oil used for cooking.


"Sometimes they even spray while the kids and other people are out in the fields," said Monica Eng, an American consultant for the United Nations.


Meanwhile, Soviet-era picking machines are getting old, increasing the demand for manual labor. In a country where half the people are under 19 -- and a high birth rate keeps that percentage growing -- the young get tapped.


Teachers in the Fergana Valley say the government lowered the minimum age for cotton-picking for the latest harvest from 14 to 12 -- but, like Danior, there are children younger even than that in the fields.


In Soviet times, too, children routinely picked cotton, although the legal minimum age was 16.


"It isn't right, not at all," said one teacher, who asked not to be identified, for fear of reprisal. To make up for canceled classes, teachers must give extra lessons during the New Year's holiday, without extra pay.