Brazil

The pressures reshaping cotton cultivation across Latin America are real, but they do not fall evenly. Scale, technology access and market proximity determine which producers absorb disruption and which do not. Nelson Dias Suassuna, senior researcher at Embrapa, draws a clear line between the sector's two operating realities and the distinct futures each one faces.

Environmental permitting systems across ten major textile-producing nations contain significant gaps in how industrial pollution from spinning mills, dye houses and garment factories is regulated, a new UNEP report has found. Most national legislation fails to classify textile activities as environmentally significant or to consider gendered impacts on workers.

Brazilian researchers have successfully demonstrated that seawater can replace significant portions of freshwater in cotton textile dyeing processes. The study evaluated reactive blue dye performance across varying seawater concentrations, revealing sustainable alternatives for water-scarce regions while maintaining commercial colour quality standards.

Coach luxury handbags have been linked to illegal Amazon deforestation through Brazilian leather supply chains connected to cattle ranching on stolen indigenous land, new investigation reveals. European fashion brands risk complicity in environmental crimes whilst marketing sustainable products to consumers seeking ethical luxury goods.

In today's world people move from one outrage to the next with as much ease as they swipe left over to the next reel. Last year’s Brazil cotton controversy has resurfaced not only because it has been a year to the revelation, but also because Better Cotton is itself pursuing the thread. And, the loopholes in Better Cotton's damage control exercise that was pointed out by Earthsight remain yawning.

A clean chit notwithstanding, Better Cotton, in not addressing the loopholes with the standard itself, has only exposed itself to further investigation. And that’s despite the sugar-coated admissions that “we will take action to expand our due diligence process."

The recent Earthsight report on cotton farming in Brazil generated a lot of heat and dust. But there's more to the issue than meets the eye, and the trials and tribulations of farming communities everywhere remain unnoticed and unacknowledged. A compelling perspective from the ground in Mexico.

UK nonprofit Earthsight’s investigations reveal nearly a million tonnes of tainted cotton from some of the most notorious estates in Brazil to clothing manufacturers in Asia, and being supplied to fast fashion behemoths H&M and Zara.

A media toolkit for cotton targets well-meaning journalists to write stories from the ground. texfash.com talks about that and stresses on the need for cotton trade associations to be a more open source for data and stories from the ground.

A private partnership involving 40 farms in Brazil, pioneering zero-deforestation in the Amazon region, has ensured the first container of 100% traceable Brazilian leather for the European market in Italy.