Standards Alone Cannot Work Towards Sustainability, Says WWF Benchmarking Study on Cotton Standards

Standards alone are insufficient for achieving sectoral transformation towards sustainability, a benchmarking exercise by WWF has concluded. Other approaches, tools and actors have critical and complementary roles to play.

The study has also pointed towards three other implications of what it unravelled:

1. Certification to a standard does not equate to sustainability. Standards are a means to pursuing sustainability objectives and differ from one another in their scopes, approaches and quality of implementation. One size does not fit all!
2. Understand how to use standards as a tool for sustainability. It is important for users (e.g. consumers, brands and retailers, etc) of standards to recognise each standard’s strengths and limitations towards addressing specific sustainability objectives.
3. Support standards to become more robust and effective. Standards should continuously seek to improve and should be supported by its users to become more robust and effective.

The implications are from WWF's report, Benchmarking of Sustainability Standards used in Cotton Production, that has just been released.

• The standards benchmarked in this exercise are: Better Cotton Initiative (Small, Medium and Large Farm criteria), Cotton Made in Africa, FairTrade International Small Producer Organization Standard with Fiber Crop Criteria, USDA National Organic Program, EU Organic Program, and India National Program for Organic Production.

The Observations: The study noticed the following:

• No standard is perfect. Standards cover certain benchmark criteria well and not others. In other words, not one of the standards benchmarked covered all the sustainability criteria that were selected for this exercise.
• There’s always room for improvement. Even where a standard has good coverage of a sustainability issue, there was always room to strengthen the criteria.
• Different standards focus on / address different needs and issues: Standards differ from one another in sustainability issues that they cover; some standards cover some sustainability issues better and worse than other standards.
• Good coverage of a sustainability issue is not everything. The quality of implementation matters a great deal.

The Methodology: The study culled out the 65 criteria from the six standards and grouped them into categories related to various sustainability themes relevant for the cotton sector:

1. Agrochemicals,
2. Soil,
3. Water,
4. Biodiversity,
5. Climate change,
6. Monitoring & evaluation,
7. Gender,
8. Forced & child labour,
9. Workers' rights,
10. Working conditions.

Recommendation: The report said it is crucial that sustainability efforts go further than certification to ensure a holistic approach for improving sustainability throughout the entire cotton value chain, from knowing the origins of sourced cotton to investing in smallholder farmers to advocating for producers to receive a living wage.