Chinese Cotton Goes Green (or at least Greener)
The Chinese Ministry of Commerce says that the national government needs to create a market growth strategy to build a sustainable cotton textile industry. The routes to success are predicted to come through active participation in the Better Cotton Initiative and through offering fiscal, tariff and tax breaks for trade in international sustainable and organic cotton with a particular focus on the African cotton market.
What’s sustainable cotton?
The sustainable cotton goal is to change production, manufacturing and usage of cotton to make a healthy and profitable industry for cotton farmers and their communities, manufacturers, retailers and end users of cotton products. Included in this process is creating less chemically dependent practices. But it’s not organic and its aims are about building longer term business health, of which longer term planetary health is something of a subsidiary goal.
Perhaps surprisingly, cotton is one of China’s most important agricultural crops and the sole income of more than 100,000 cotton farmers. Perhaps even more important in the eyes of the Chinese is the economic health of more than 7,000 textile companies based in China, using locally produced cotton to produce domestic and export textiles, ranging from good luck symbols to be displayed at temples through to cotton room dividers used as temporary walls in crowded city housing.
China’s Cotton Deficit
On the downside, 30 – 40% cent of all pesticides used in China are applied to cotton and cotton farming and harvesting uses around 3,000 to 5,000 cubic metres of water per hectare, with most of this water coming from irrigation in regions already experiencing declining water tables.
It’s not just water that’s falling – the price for cotton has sunk by 33% since August as a result of hedge funds selling commodities to cover losses, and credit crunch fears have reduced demand for cotton clothing products. On top of this global concern, China’s failures to deliver on safety standards in relation to foodstuffs like milk, and luxury goods like children’s toys, has left it struggling in media-savvy markets in the West, so a redesign of policy may be necessary to achieve harmony between producer and purchasers. Like many other nations, China is discovering that sustainable growing practices may be more than good PR: they may become an absolute necessity in the face of rising costs, falling prices for finished goods, and more media scrutiny of the toxic effects of intensively produced cotton.
Photograph author’s own
Better Cotton is nor organic, itś not organic grow cotton. Better cotton is GMO cotton. That can’t be good. A lot of people involved in organic textiles are against the “better cotton” iniciative because it stands against all that we care about, it’s against farmers and Earth. I think hard to belive that going the GMO way and placing the control of the production in tha hands of a few large enterprises that will sell the seeds is good. It’s not. It’s politics and monopolies.
Hi Paulo, yes it’s something of a concern isn’t it, that the business model China has chosen is non-organic and somewhat monopolistic?
But having seen some cotton production facilities there, I’ve got to say that almost anything would be an improvement on the current water and pesticide intensive regime.
Nice writing, Kay. You just give us the facts (ma’m), without editorializing.
I agree, the sooner the Chinese stop emulating American agri-business — profits before people — the better off their textile industry will be.
Hi Ramon! Nice point.
[...] if peanut farmers drop their peanut crop, the soil will be used to grow an extra cotton crop, and that is a highly intensively managed crop, requiring irrigation, pesticides and fertilisers, [...]