The Big Swap: Cotton
February 23, 2010 @ 02:31 PM
This entry continues our Big Swap series with cotton. The Big Swap is a simple idea: for the next two weeks, swap out something you buy regularly for the Fair Trade alternative. Coffee, chocolate, cutting boards, bananas, and more. Learn more.
The Broken System
Cotton is everywhere. It touches all of us, quite literally, just about every day. The dark side of cotton’s ubiquity is the pain extracted from cotton farmers to make sure our prices stay low.
India is the world’s 2nd largest cotton producer (behind China), and the bulk of Indian cotton farmers come from its lower castes. Over the last 10 years, these farmers have seen input costs like seeds, fertilizers, and pesticides rise, while the per-pound price of cotton has been cut almost in half. This makes it increasingly difficult for farmers to make ends meet.
This desperation breeds two consequences. First, farmers are forced to cut costs wherever they can, and labor is the quickest and easiest fix. Here’s a quote that sums up one farmer’s attitude toward the labor cost issue. “The most important thing is labour costs. Nearly half of our investment goes towards payment of labour charges. The wage rates for children are far lower than adult wages. We can reduce our labour costs considerably if we hire girl children. If we want to hire adult labour we have to pay higher wages. With the current procurement price we get from the seed companies we can not afford to pay higher wages to the labourers.” More than 400,000 children are involved in cotton farming, keeping them out of schools, and trapped in the generational cycles of poverty.
The second consequence of this desperation is suicide. Between April and June, cotton farmers learn whether or not their crop has failed, and consequently whether or not they can afford to pay the moneylenders who they use to help finance their input costs. Forced to walk a razor’s edge, these farmers often see suicide as the only way out of a failed season. The dreadful statistics are that approximately 18,000 farmers commit suicide every year in India. In addition, according to the World Health Organization, every year over 20,000 farmers die and millions more suffer chronic diseases caused by pesticide poisoning. These are but a few of the high prices paid for cheap cotton.
Fair trade cotton has the potential to right these wrongs. HAE Now, our partner in India, works right in the midst of this broken system. They focus their efforts on both the Fair Trade and Organic aspects of cotton production in an attempt to address the problems highlighted to the left.
Fair Trade: As always, Fair Trade means a living wage, paid regularly, with no child labor (and a host of other benefits). In the Indian cotton industry, it means that our farmers don’t face the desperation felt by their counterparts in the conventional cotton industry. It means that their children are in school, rather than working 14 hour days in the cotton fields. It means they’re treated like human beings, rather than a means to an end.
Organic: The organic aspect of cotton farming has multiple implications as well. It means that farmers aren’t forced to indebt themselves to loan sharks in order to pay for pesticides up front, banking on a good harvest to pay off that debt. Despite cotton fields occupying only 3% of the world’s farmland, they use 25% of the world’s chemical pesticides! Not on our farms. This means the cotton in our T-Shirts from HAE Now is safer for the farmers and their families, safer for our families here in America, and much better for the planet we share.
For Kusum Rao (pictured) organic, Fair Trade, cotton cultivation has truly changed his life. Since working with HAE Now, he no longer has to take out loans at exorbitant rates to purchase chemicals that endanger his family’s lives. He grows better, healthier crops, and lives a better, healthier lifestyle. He can now save money to send his children to school, and doesn’t live in fear of moneylenders.
Now What?
We want to hear what you’re Swapping, why you’re Swapping, where you’re Swapping, we want to know! So share your swapping story in the comments section of this post.