Cotton, It's Natural.. right?

United Nations Food and Agriculture Organisation (UNFAO) International Year of Natural Fibres - launched 22nd January 2009

As the FAO launches 2009 as the International Year of Natural Fibres, EJF calls on consumers to remember that ‘natural’ doesn’t necessarily mean ‘green’ and that ‘natural fibres’ like cotton, unless grown organically and traded fairly, are often produced with terrible environmental and human rights abuses.

Cotton production makes up two-thirds of the 30 million tonnes of natural fibres produced every year worldwide; a market that’s worth over US$32 billion. This ‘white gold’ could be a crop that builds lives and sustains the environment but more often than not it brings misery to millions.

Steve Trent, Executive Director of EJF says “Cotton has the potential to be a great natural fibre, but all too often its production is linked to environmental exploitation and abusive working conditions for cotton labourers. If this is the year to raise the profile of natural fibres in order to help sustain the income and food security of poor farmers and workers in the industry then let’s do it properly.

Consumers, governments and industry must work together to create an industry that is sustainable and equitable for all. Let’s start by outlawing deadly chemical pesticides such as endosulfan, stop wasting precious water supplies and get the kids, who are forced to labour, out of the cotton fields, and give their parents and communities a better future”.

Cotton - a natural fibre? Poison
The hazardous pesticides sprayed onto cotton crops poison thousands of farmers and their families in the developing world. One chemical – endosulfan – attributed to serious health problems, including birth deformities, convulsions and death remains as one of the most widely used pesticides in the developing world. This chemical, although banned for use in the EU due to its toxicity, is produced in the EU and marketed to farmers in Africa and Asia.

Cotton - a natural fibre? Abuse
Cotton production is rife with child labour. Whether it’s state enforced or illegal trafficking, millions of children face severe exploitation. In Egypt during the cotton harvest an estimated one million children from the age of seven work 77 hours a week in the cotton fields. Abuses include exposure to pesticides and beatings. In Uzbekistan, the world’s 3rd largest exporter of cotton, roughly a third of the population are forced to work in conditions near slavery for the state run cotton industry. Many are children. Schools across the country are shut down for the cotton harvest as children work for weeks in the fields, paid little or nothing. Europe buys around one third of all Uzbek cotton.

Cotton - a natural fibre? Greed
Cotton production is heavily subsidised in the West, pushing world prices down and making farmers in the global south sell at a loss. In Vidarbha, India, it is estimated that 3 farmers commit suicide everyday due to spiralling debt. Corrupt regimes such as Uzbekistan destroy farmer livelihoods further by forcibly buying cotton for one third of the market price, making $1 billion annually from the country’s poor.

Cotton - a natural fibre? Destruction
Irrigation for the cotton industry has drained the Aral Sea, a man-made catastrophe described by the UN one of the most “staggering environmental disasters of the 20th Century”. An exposed, polluted, dusty sea bed larger than the size of Germany remains bringing destitution, disability and death to its local community, which formerly depended on the rich fisheries the Aral sustained.


The Environmental Justice Foundation’s ‘Pick Your Cotton Carefully’ campaign works to transform the cotton industry to alleviate poverty by driving consumer, corporate and political action on issues to resolve pesticide
misuse, poverty and child labour that are associated with global cotton production. www.ejfoundation.org/cotton