Lie Another Day: How Cotton's Image Was Sullied by the Media and Activists Alike

It makes no sense to summarise the findings of the Transformers Foundation studies; those are freely available on the organisation’s website. Nevertheless, it is worth recollecting the thought-provoking discussions of a webinar held in February 2021, just some months before the study was published.

The 2,700 litres or 7,000 litres or even 20,000 litres numbers that are thrown around by cotton-haters are the outcomes of global averages. It’s a different thing that those who bandy these numbers around never tell you how they conjured them up in the first place. That aside, global averages without a context do not really mean anything. Water usage (as much for cotton as virtually everything else) varies—it varies from country to country, from season to season, from one terrain to another, and from one field or farmer to another. This is not about comparing chalk with cheese. It’s more like calculating the average of 14 oranges and 16 pencils and coming up with a mean of 23 penguins. The exercise is as absurd as that, but the lie peddlers don’t get it.

In that webinar, journalist and researcher Simon Ferrigno spoke about the need to understand the water system itself, especially of the cotton grown is rainfed or utilises irrigated water. He made an important statement there: water is not something that is used; it is borrowed. It is crucial to understand the difference between used and used up. In the latter, it’s gone—for good.

But that doesn’t happen with cotton, or most other crops. The water seeps in as groundwater recharge, and the water is also used for other purposes. Those are either diverted to other fields, or even to nearby areas that sustain biodiversity, in many cases even wildlife.

Not a great analogy, but here’s something that one hopes lie perpetrators would probably understand. Using 50 litres of water under the shower in your bathroom is not exactly the same thing as getting drenched in the rain. The point is whether the remnant water from crop usage is clean and fit for usage for other purposes. And, irrigation is a problem in itself.

But even then, you wouldn’t get the numbers. Dr Keshav Kranthi, Chief Scientist at the International Cotton Advisory Committee (ICAC), sifted through the numbers at that same webinar. Cotton is grown over 34 million hectares and receives 248 trillion litres of rainwater. During the cotton season, this number drops to about 178 trillion litres. That would make for 7,000–8,000 litres of water to produce 1kg of lint. That’s water—just for emphasis—from the skies. 

Now, the amount of irrigated water used worldwide is 29 trillion litres to produce roughly 25 million tonnes of cotton. That would mean 1,214 litres of irrigated water to produce 1kg of lint. Farmers in India and African countries get about 350kg of lint per hectare with rainwater. In case of irrigation, this goes up to 1,200kg. In the best-case scenario this is 450kg. So, you can get an additional 800kg of lint only through irrigation. You end up with a figure of 2,746 litres to produce 1kg of lint. Now, if a t-shirt weighs 200gm, then you need 2,746 litres to get five 5 t-shirts—or, roughly 550 litres of water to produce that one t-shirt. This is nowhere near the 2,700 litres benchmark.

Kranthi had also talked about the positives of cotton that are ignored during the myth assertions. Cotton sequesters carbon to the tune of 14 million tonnes annually, provides 2 billion mandays of employment and livelihoods to 100 million people around the world.

It is important to know how these fake numbers were construed, and who has made the best of the fictitious narratives that have been built around these statistical fallacies.

But, it may be worthwhile to simply get an idea of how these narratives are flogged to the unsuspecting masses and the extent of the damage that has been inflicted on cotton.

During the Transformers Foundation webinars, a number of videos were shown to illustrate the problem at hand. One of these was a BBC Three video showing a young woman tossing shocking numbers at equally young shoppers. One of the assertions was this: it takes 10,330 litres of water to produce one cotton jacket and this would be equivalent to 24 years of drinking water for an average person. So, would you buy such jackets? The stupefied shoppers vowed not to.

The video was more of a campaign against cotton than anything else. The numbers, of course, are fake, but that this came from the stable of the BBC is more concerning. That’s not all. The numbers have been debunked, but the October 2018 video still exists on YouTube and keeps getting shared across social media. And, there’s more. The comments section gives an idea about the effect it has had. One viewer wrote: “My teacher showed us this in school today and let me tell you this actually changed my way of thinking about shopping.” So, the lie is now trickling down generations.

There is another video—this one from National Geographic, and dates back to January 2013. Even this one has not been pulled down, and continues to perpetuate the misinformation.

For the sake of academic interest, one can note that the primary source of the 20,000 litres claim was traced by the Cotton: A Case Study in Misinformationstudy to the World Wildlife Fund’s 1999 report ‘The Impact of Cotton on Fresh Water Resources and Ecosystems’. This, in turn, was ostensibly sourced from a bunch of earlier studies, including FAO statistics from 1977 and 1982.

This 20,000 litres myth had been highlighted on various WWF websites since 2011 and were taken down only in 2021. On some WWF sites, the assertion remains even on this day.

The Transformers Foundation study, as also its writers, talk about the fake narratives in the context of the current societal juncture where lies fly. The cotton misinformation problem needs to be seen in the light of today’s society where fake news thrives and wreaks havoc.

That is true, what is also true is what Terry Townsend, former ICAC Executive Director and cotton statistician, had contended in one of the webinars. The root cause of these lies is self-interest and it is germane to notice who benefit. Retailers and brands have been using these numbers to differentiate themselves (not worrying either about the veracity or the consequences). Townsend remains the only one to call a spade a spade. He described Textile Exchange as the root source of many of the myths surrounding cotton. He also spoke about the WWF and the Environmental Justice Foundation (EJF), which have been seeding and promoting these lies.

Indeed, most of the misinformation can be traced to WWF. It is an organisation that no one wants to take head on. It is rich, powerful and unbelievably influential. Just ask documentary filmmaker Wilfried Huismann, whose Silence of the Pandas has disappeared into thin air. The WWF has many detractors—all for good reason, with Survival International consistently exposing its wrongs. Still, the latter’s allegations are hardly ever seen in mainstream media. You should wonder why so.

Yet, today WWF is a big player in the fashion industry. It is associated with Better Cotton (which has been accused of brushing under the carpet the same kinds of human rights abuses that have been perpetrated under its watch as WWF) and is one of the founding partners of the Science Based Targets initiative (which incidentally has also been under a cloud for environmental misdemeanour). 

It’s not difficult to find out how the cotton myths came into being. It’s been documented to the last detail. It’s also not difficult to find out who have been flinging and slinging these falsehoods. You can ferret out all the details with some patience and then join the dots.

To describe the state of affairs as one of misinformation is to let the perpetrators off the hook (in fact, they have got away squeaky clean). It is also to allow this to remain as an unfortunate tragedy of errors. Cotton needs to be more assertive, and possibly a bit aggressive too.