We’re really keen to tell you all about a fair trade organic cotton project in India. Many of our spring clothing items have been made using cotton from this project and when we visited the project in November we were just amazed at the way these projects have completely transformed lives.
Below is a brief description of the project..
Hyderabad is a noisy frenzied place. Motorbikes, cars, tuc tucs, and reliable old Ambassador taxis compete for road space, hooting at each other all the time often just to be part of the traffic conversation. This is the city of the great electronic and software boom, and the sprawl of new buildings and full hotels are testimony to this.
We left the bustle of the city, and headed West for several hours along the tree lined dusty road into the countryside where ancient granite boulders lie still and quiet - balancing bald silhouettes stretching out across the vast beautiful plains of Andhra Pradesh. In stark contrast to the urban cacophony, the rural poor farming folk eke out a living in small villages and rural communities - life here couldn’t be more different.
Our destination was a place where cotton farmers had been forced into a spiral of debt from loans they had procured to buy pesticides and chemical fertilisers. As the land had become exhausted so more fertilisers and pesticides had to be bought to keep up the cotton yield. When the cotton price dropped so low that debts could not be repaid, many farmers had become suicidal and farming communities were on the brink of ruin.
We later found out that in this same region over 100,000 children work 13 hours a day for just 30 pence. Studies have shown that in areas such as these children perform badly in tests to assess mental ability, memory, concentration, cognitive skills, balance, and co-ordination1.
With a near total lack of safety measures, low quality equipment and with protective
clothing often unavailable or too expensive, Indian cotton production represents a highly unsafe environment to work in2.
Cotton is the world’s thirstiest crop – six pints of water are needed to produce one single cotton bud3.
Cotton cultivation is one of the most intensive crops. 60% of all toxic chemicals used in India are from cotton farming. This causes not only pollution of the soil and environment, but causes serious health problems to the farmers who are spraying these toxic chemical pesticides. Diseases were rife among farmers and labourers’ families who reported suffering from irritated eyes, skin problems, respiratory and joint problems and sometimes even cancer was attributed to the use of this cocktail of chemicals.
We arrived at The Organic Cotton Project. This is a project that has been set up by a Netherlands based international development organisation with 20 years experience in fair trade worldwide. This particular project is supporting villages of farmers to help them convert from conventional agriculture to organic cotton farming and where they can rely on a guaranteed fair price for their crop.
By supporting conversion projects we can bring more organic cotton to the market, and at the same time guarantee the farmers and their families a fair price within safe and economically sustainable environments.
We were overwhelmed by the amazing enthusiasm and heart warming gratitude with which the farmers greeted us. We heard story after story about how this project has transformed people’s lives. They showed us the meticulously kept records for organic certification and taught us the intricate details of how remarkable organic agriculture actually is (the whole process is almost magical!). And along with witnessing the excitement and pride in the arrival of a brand new weighing scale, we felt privileged to come to understand first hand the real life impact the purchase of this cotton and its resultant economic stability has had for these people.
Look out for this mark - the cotton in the clothes that have this mark against them have all been produced from this project.
Jo & Julian
1 & 3 Source: 'Pick Your Cotton Carefully' by The Environmental Justice Foundation.
2 Source: EJF, 2007 'The Deadly Chemicals in Cotton' by The Environmental Justice Foundation, in collaboration with Pesticide Action Network UK.