Recently, agribusiness celebrated having achieved for the first time the leadership in world cotton exportssurpassing the United States. Since colonial times, this leadership has been disputed, in a market that includes India and China, as major global producers and exporters of this commodity.
This result is the result of a joint effort by cotton producers and the agro-chemical industry to achieve financial benefits for investments in technology, tax exemptions and institutional support, which would facilitate its expansion and consolidation in the Cerrado biome over the last 25 years.
Like soybeans and corn, cotton is one of the engines of growth and profitability in agribusiness, and acquires a status special and differentiated from other products due to the “sustainability” attributed to it by its producers and national certifications ABR and the international Better Cotton, based in Switzerland.
However, monoculture cultivation with intensive use of fertilizers and pesticides, with the expulsion of workers from the field and without benefiting local communities cannot be called sustainable, as it violates the basic principles of this concept. The agricultural narrative that presents Brazil as “the largest exporter of sustainable cotton in the world” has been confronted by numerous academic studies in recent years, revealing that the Sou de Algodão Movement, created by producers to disseminate the culture of agricultural cotton, It’s another case of Greenwashing of the Fashion industry.
The case of Brazilian cotton took a serious turn in April this year when the London-based international NGO, Earthsight, published a report called “Fashion Crimes”. The document demonstrates that the world’s largest fashion retail brands, Zara and H&M, use Better Cotton certified Brazilian cotton linked to land grabbing, illegal deforestation, violence, human rights violations and corruption. Using extensive documentation, the investigation tracked the cotton from the SLC and Grupo Horita farms in western Bahia, through Asian spinning mills and clothing factories, until it reached stores in Europe.
While the world’s attention turns to the destruction of the Amazon forests, the Cerrado biome has been suffering rampant and systematic devastation since the beginning of the 2000s. Industrial-scale agriculture has already destroyed half of the native vegetation and we have seen the problem worsen in recent years with deforestation rates increasing by 43% in 2023 compared to the previous year.
The company investigated by Eartsight, SLC, is the largest cotton producer in Brazil, and both it and the Horita Group, one of the six largest producers, have their production linked to a series of illegalities. Both families originate from the South of Brazil and are among the richest in the country. Local civil society leaders reported that it is rare to find soybean or cotton farms in western Bahia that are not the result of land grabbing, and this can be seen in the numerous records of territorial dispute processes since the beginning of the occupation of the Cerrado in 1970-1980, illegal deforestation, cases of corruption, violence and negligence by the state government.
Despite the evidence of facts revealed in the Earthsight report, Better Cotton certified the cotton production of both companies and the product contaminated by the violence and destruction of the Cerrado is sold abroad as “sustainable”. The inevitable conclusion is that the certification processes are extremely flawed and inefficient, not taking care of certificates of legal ownership, monitoring of deforestation, and quantities of agrochemicals used and contamination of communities surrounding cultivated areas.
And to make matters even worse, the ONG showed, in recent weeks, surprising revelations from a former Better Cotton employee about the manipulation of data on the certifier’s online platform, which has more than 13,000 users around the world. According to the source, the lack of data verification and manipulations are such that it is possible that some unaudited quantities of conventional cotton are included on the platform as “certified sustainable cotton”. Additionally, Better Cotton rarely checks companies in the supply chain for compliance with its guidelines, with producers simply self-declaring. Apparently, Better Cotton has been concerned about its growth and financial results, as the fees charged to its customers and associates are proportional to the volumes purchased, that is, the more cotton, the better.
Certifications are an essential tool for ensuring traceability of the origin of sustainable products, they bring confidence to consumers that the production chain is ethical, respects Human Rights and decent work. However, what we are seeing is that in the case of Better Cotton, the rigor with audit protocols and approval of producer records has been relaxed in favor of the company’s profit, not in the name of promoting and encouraging ethical production chains in the cotton industry. Fashion.
For us in Brazil, we are aware that, as number one customers and consumers of 100% Brazilian cotton, we are also subject to lack of control and the weaknesses of ABR and BCI certifications. Fashion brands associated with the Sou de Algodão Movement should begin demanding that certified farms obtain community approval for activities that affect them, that cotton grown is not linked to areas deforested before 2019, and that audits are conducted by impartial agents.
Fashion brands committed to sustainability and socio-environmental responsibility should ask where Brazilian cotton comes from and how it was produced, even if it has Better Cotton or ABR certification. Let’s do our part and raise the sustainability bar in Fashion.
