More than twenty workers are being treated in hospital in southern Kazakhstan after taking part in a mass hunger strike to protest against unpaid wages. Campaigners say over a thousand workers at a large phosphate mine in the southern town of Zhanatas have been on hunger strike for more than a week. They are demanding more than two years in unpaid wages, and say they've been living off food coupons because the local authorities don't have the money to pay them. The BBC's Central Asia correspondent Louise Hidalgo reports:

Strikes and rallies against the growing poverty that many Kazaks face, are increasingly common despite tough laws against political protests. Workers at the phosphate mine in Zhanatas say their patience too has now finally run out.

They claim they're owed more than $7m in unpaid wages, and that the food coupons that they have been receiving instead, no longer give them enough to live on. The strikers paint a bleak picture of life in this once prosperous southern town.

Many houses have no heating, and there are only a few hours of electricity a day, in a region where temperatures drop to minus ten. Some of the protestors are campaigning out in yurts, the traditional felt huts of the nomadic Kazak tribes, in a mark, they say, of their desperation.

The story of Zhanatas is repeated in industrial towns across much of this vast country. Kazakhstan has huge untapped reserves of oil and gas, it'll be some years before the petro-dollars begin to flow.