Measuring Sustainability in Cotton Production

By Jim.Robinson|September 11, 2013

Any coordinated, industry-wide effort on measuring the sustainability of cotton farming must start with discussion and agreement on what are the key issues that need to be addressed, what are the best measures to use to assess progress towards becoming more sustainable, and who the appropriate stakeholders are to take on the issues at hand.

ICAC’s Expert Panel on the Social, Economic and Environmental Performance of Cotton Production (SEEP) has prepared a list of recommended indicators that will serve as the starting point for discussion by delegates at the 72nd Plenary Meeting of the ICAC in Colombia during the World Café on Challenges Facing Cotton, on October 1st.

The list of recommended indicators was developed by 1) reviewing a comprehensive range of programs to extract their indicators and creating an inventory of potential indicators; 2) selecting the most relevant ones from this inventory through an objective rating system and 3) expert review of the selected indicators.

This Executive Summary of the report, “Measuring sustainability in cotton farming systems: Towards a guidance framework” along with the list of recommended indicators to measure sustainability in cotton production is available online at:

https://www.icac.org/mtgs/Plenary/72nd-Plenary/Documents?lang=en-US (English);