Industry Needs to Hold Itself Accountable to Ensure the Rigour of Standards

Especially in a country like India, the largest producer of cotton, guides like the Cottonup Guide, Delta Framework, etc, need to ensure that they reach the smallholder farmers (a bulk of them either being illiterate or certainly not conversant in English). How are you working on this?
Neil Walker: The CottonUp Guide and Delta Framework are designed to help brands and retailers source sustainable cotton and align on standards but they are not necessarily targeted at smallholder farmers.

After eight years of convening actors across the cotton sector to align on issues critical for the industry’s future, theCotton 2040 initiative has come to a close. Although the initiative has concluded, we certainly encourage companies procuring cotton to consider how they can work with on-ground groups and organisations, as well as sustainable standards working with farmers, to ensure farmers get the information they need in the way they need it.

The bigger imperative right now, for me, is that farmers are supported in an appropriate, equitable manner to transition to sustainable agriculture methods, and are not expected to do so alone. The financial costs of doing so are significant.

Then, there's the question of farmer suicides in India. It's a subject matter that often gets ignored in most studies/reports (unless those are specifically about suicides). Reactions, please.
Neil Walker: It’s not an area I’m highly familiar with, having worked with partners based in the UK and Europe. Sadly, I have heard that many European and British farmers face similar challenges. In a period of highly volatile weather and inflationary costs, farming is an uncertain profession that places tremendous financial and economic challenges on farmers’ livelihoods. We—and by ‘we’ I mean everyone working in or around cotton—talk a lot about improving livelihoods of farmers, but we should also focus on quality of life for farmers, and how we can support them holistically.

Globally, the production of virgin cotton fibre has decreased from 25.1 MT in 2021/22 to 24.4 MT in 2022/23. In other words, in spite of all the rhetoric, brands and retailers are using less cotton (and instead hiking up synthetic intake). Purely in this light, do you think Cotton 2040 was a success? Surely, the share of cotton needs to go up.
Neil Walker: Partially, this reality is informed by the same challenges I outlined in response to your first question. It is becoming much harder to grow cotton in certain areas. For instance, the severe flooding in Pakistan in 2022 caused the country’s lowest harvest in nearly 40 years.

Cotton 2040’s success isn’t solely measured by global cotton volume, rather, it aimed to align stakeholders across the value chain to advance a more sustainable and resilient cotton sector. The production of virgin cotton fibre also depends on a huge variety of factors, and increasing virgin cotton fibre isn’t necessarily a positive outcome on its own. The industry should also prioritise increasing the production and use of recycled cotton, fibres from waste clothing, or other waste materials.

A circular fashion value chain may mean decreasing volumes of virgin cotton, and poses questions of ensuring a just transition for farmers away from cotton production. In doing so we absolutely have to focus on ensuring that all virgin cotton production is regenerative and economically sustainable for farmers.

Over 50 brands and retailers had participated in Cotton 2040. Ideally, these companies should be setting examples. So, is there any mechanism through which one can track the progress of these brands and retailers?
Neil Walker: Not at this time. 

The Impact report lays a lot of emphasis on raising the level of ambition around cotton standards. One of the standards mentioned throughout the report was Better Cotton, which itself has been under cloud in the last one year for more than one reason. Comments, please.
Neil Walker: This journey towards improving cotton standards is ongoing, and organisations like Better Cotton, among many others, have encountered challenges along the way. I believe that Better Cotton is working for a better future of cotton production, just like the other sustainable standards. We can’t expect organisations to get everything right immediately, but equally, we have to hold a high standard of where we want to get to, and the industry needs to hold itself accountable to ensure the rigour of these standards, as well as the pace of change, is commensurate with what is required for social and environmental goals. 

The Impact Report ends with talk about legacy. How do you plan to keep track of what bearing the findings, learnings and tools are having on the cotton industry at large, and the various stakeholder participants specifically?
Neil Walker: To this day, the various outputs and models developed by Cotton 2040 are mentioned by partners as relevant and useful. We continue to work in the apparel sector more broadly through our projects likeEnabling Systemic Circularity in Fashion, and work collaboratively with partners we had in Cotton 2040, including Textile Exchange, Laudes Foundation, Organic Cotton Accelerator, and others.

In fact, we have just launcheda report with our findings of the world’s first regenerative cotton ecosystem services pilot in the US, so the work is still ongoing in the cotton industry and making a meaningful impact!