Organic and Fair Trade Cotton
March 16, 2010 With the global economic recession slowly being less dominant in minds and media, another problem is coming back to public awareness: the global food crisis and the corresponding discussion about commodities and agricultural production.
Indeed, this discussion is highly relevant as the prospect for available arable land reveals this — whereas in the 1970s approximately 0.45 hectare of arable land was available per capita, this figure has now decreased to 0.25 hectare. Extrapolated with even only medium figures for future population growth, this figure will shrink to a mere 0.16 hectare in 2030.
In this context, the production conditions for agricultural commodities become more and more relevant, especially where small farmers make up a relevant part of the production. The burning question is: do these production conditions favor a socio-economic well-being of the rural population and, at the same time, do they not put natural resources like soil and water at risk?
For an increasing amount of participants from the textile industry, from cotton production countries and from the development cooperation community, one of the possible answers to this complex challenge is organic and fair trade cotton production.
This perspective is shared by Helvetas with its partners from the Swiss State Secretariat of Economic Affairs (SECO), Interchurch Organisation for Development Co-Operation Netherlands (ICCO) and many further links in the textile value chain. The combination of organic and fair trade cotton production enables smallholders to improve their livelihoods while increasing soil fertility and maintaining freshwater and groundwater bodies uncontaminated by agrochemicals.
Though farmers’ livelihood comprises many other aspects than sheer income, independent impact assessments in West Africa and Central Asia revealed gross margin increases of 25 to 30 percent for organic and fair trade cotton farmers, when compared to their conventional peers.
Beyond this quantitative benefit, project farmers mentioned further non-monetary benefits in these impact assessments, such as: occupational health; diversification via crop rotations and thus less risk of crop failure, opportunities for additional income and increase of food security; independency of farm credits and its corresponding risks; less work because efforts to apply agrochemicals are saved; and an increase of water retention capacities of soils.
It is no surprise that especially landlocked countries, without their own relevant fertilizer production, are attracted to this kind of production. They find themselves in a double squeeze of rising fertilizer prices and rising transport costs. For them, the strategy of high internal input (bio mass, green manures) and decoupling production from fertilizer dependencies is even more appropriate.
Helvetas, SECO and ICCO consequently expanded their efforts in Central Asia and started a project in Tajikistan to go along with the already well-performing project in Kyrgyzstan.
So far this approach makes sense on the production side. What is happening on the demand side? More than 350 stakeholders — ranging from large retailers, supermarket chains, specific ecotextile companies and representatives from organic cotton production projects — met on the occasion of the Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations’ International Year of the Natural Fibre in September 2009 in Interlaken, Switzerland to discuss this matter.
The surprising conclusion was that even the economic crisis did not reverse the trend of increasing demand for organic and fair trade products. The growth story of previous years remains intact, although the pace of supply growth was higher than the pace of demand growth. The congress also included a highly acclaimed fashion show that visualized that even the fashion scene can gain a lot of credibility and momentum when the companies include organic and fair trade cotton into their designs.
With its outlook to respond to the described challenges in the commodity sector, organic and fair trade cotton also paves the way for further cotton initiatives that are targeting more at the mass market. These achievements can act as a landmark and yardstick for how the entire industry can increase its sustainability performance.
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