Cotton used by fast fashion behemoths H&M and Zara has been linked to largescale deforestation, land grabbing, human rights abuses and violent land conflicts in the Brazilian Cerrado.
The accusations against the two European fashion giants have come in a damning report—Fashion Crimes: The European Retail Giants Linked to Dirty Brazilian Cotton—by Earthsight.
The indictment is that of the two organisation’s cotton sourcing policies, but then neither buys this cotton directly—they source their clothes largely from garment suppliers based in Asia.
It took UK nonprofit Earthsight’s investigators a year to analyse satellite images, court rulings, shipment records and going undercover at global trade shows to trace nearly a million tonnes of tainted cotton from some of the most notorious estates in Brazil to clothing manufacturers in Asia.
They found that H&M and Zara’s suppliers source cotton grown in the western portion of the Brazilian state of Bahia by two of the country’s largest producers: SLC Agrícola and Grupo Horita (Horita Group). SLC and Horita’s cotton production in western Bahia—a part of the Cerrado biome that has been heavily impacted by industrial-scale agribusiness—is linked to a number of illegalities.
The cotton of Brazil
Cotton is important to Brazil. It is now the world’s second largest exporter and expected to overtake the US as the number one cotton supplier by 2030. In the decade to 2023, Brazil’s exports more than doubled. Almost all this cotton is grown in the Cerrado.
The Cerrado region is a biodiversity hotspot. It is made of dramatic plateaus and lush valleys covering a quarter of the country, and is home to 5% of all the world’s species, including the giant anteater and giant armadillo. A quarter of this unique land has been lost to agricultural expansion in recent decades. Nearly a fifth of the Cerrado’s species, including the maned wolf and blue-eyed ground dove, face extinction due to habitat loss. Those lands are now vast cotton and soy monocultures.
The report says: “Local residents showed Earthsight dry riverbeds and lost springs. Agribusinesses in western Bahia extract nearly two billion litres of water per day. They pay this back by dumping 600 million litres of pesticides on the Cerrado every year. The climate impact has been enormous: clearing Cerrado vegetation for agricultural production generates as much carbon per year as the annual emissions of 50 million cars. Cotton production has an extremely high carbon footprint compared to other commodities due to the heavy use of pesticides for its production.
“Local civil society told our investigators it is hard to find a single largescale cotton or soy farm in all of western Bahia that is not the result of land grabbing. This report will show that corruption, violence and government neglect have helped transform.”
Among those responsible are SLC and Horita. The former owns 44,000 hectares of cotton plantations in western Bahia alone, and is the country’s largest cotton producer. The latter, among the top six in the country operates on at least 140,000 hectares of farmland in the region.
The Earthsight report says the Horita Group and SLC Agrícola are emblematic of a broader reality of export-oriented agribusinesses inflicting harm on the Cerrado, its traditional communities and the climate.
