The sun never sets on the ancient fiber

By Jess Ennis|March 12, 2010

You hold in your hands the 77th edition of the venerable COTTON INTERNATIONAL ANNUAL. My involvement in its creation, as the new publisher, has been one of the most challenging and rewarding projects I’ve undertaken in my fifteen years here at Meister Media Worldwide.

I quickly discovered one of the great charms and challenges of this market, as I phoned industry leaders in Asia, Africa, Europe, India, and North and South America – the sun never sets on cotton. At any given moment in time, someone somewhere is open for business and trading this ancient fiber. Across the globe, across the cultures, and around the clock, cotton business is being transacted. I feel richer for this experience of the past few months.

Like so many of the people, families and businesses involved in the global cotton industry, the COTTON INTERNATIONAL ANNUAL spans generations. I was amazed, during my maiden international cotton excursion this past October, to meet several of you who are running businesses that were started by your families seven or more generations ago. Few such industries exist in the world.

This Annual, first published in 1931, has not only narrated the remarkable story of the world’s cotton industry, it has chronicled your lives and generations of your families. One pillar of the industry told me that, in his personal library, he has every single issue of the COTTON INTERNATIONAL ANNUAL going back to 1943. Such a collection of stories, reports, experts’ opinions and statistics vividly chronicles the cotton industry’s evolution every step of the way. It also serves as a cotton industry family album, displaying hundreds of photos taken at industry events through the years. What an honor it is for me to be a part of this living heritage.

And what a fascinating moment to become involved in the global cotton industry, especially since my earlier background and training is as an agricultural economist. The worst of the perfect storm of economic upheaval that deluged this industry appears to have subsided, and now one can see in the aftermath the living shoots of optimism, innovation, and recovery emerging from the muck and sprouting upward.