The Global Lives of Indian Cotton
Through cotton, farmers, weavers, scientists, and wearers imagine Others across an ancient global commodity chain. It begins with a seed.
Project conceived and designed by Andrew Flachs, with contributions from Elizabeth Brite, Maura Finkelstein, Karen Tranberg Hansen, Sandip Hazareesingh, Irna Hofman, Tanya Matthan, Alessandra Mezzadri, Meena Menon, Robert N. Spengler III, Kedron Thomas, Vaishnavi Tripuraneni, Udaanta, Jonathan Wendel, and Emily A. Wolff. Text and media by Andrew Flachs except where otherwise noted. This map is best viewed on a computer.
Click points on this map to explore the cotton supply chain
Cotton Origins
Five to ten million years ago, a member of the Malvacea plant family, which includes okra (Abelmoschus esculentus L.) and ornamental hibiscus (Hibiscus rosa-sinensis L.) branched off from its relatives and evolved twisting, waxy hairs along its seed coat. The fibers of this new Gossypium genus may have been intended to enlist birds in dispersing seeds, they may have been a ploy to sail along the wind like dandelions (Taraxacum officinale L.), or the hairs might have acted like an umbrella to keep the rain off the seeds. Yet as cotton continued to evolve, it attracted an unexpected helper drawn to those threads - human beings.
Learn more about cotton genetics and origins:
The genus Gossypium includes about 50 wild species with an aggregate geographic range that encompasses many of the arid and seasonally arid environments in central America, Africa-Arabia, and Australia. Pictured here is some of the extraordinary diversity among these species in capsule and seed morphology (left), flowers (upper right), and leaves (lower right). Although all wild species have “lint” (botanically, epidermal single-celled trichomes) on their seeds, in most species the lint is short, tan to rust to brown-colored, and is not spinnable into threads and yarns. In one of the more remarkable stories in plant domestication, humans independently domesticated 4 different wild species, in parallel, and in the process transformed these wild species into cultivated plants that bear copious long, strong, and fine white fibers. Photo by Jonathan Wendel.
Cotton cultivation in South Asia is at least 4,300 years old. Unlike other useful fiber plants like flax or hemp, cotton can be harvested and processed directly from the plant. To botanists, "cotton" is a vague term: across the world, people and plants have co-evolved four times from the Gossypium genus. Growers in South Asia, East Africa, and the Levant domesticated G. arboreum and G. herbaceum four millennia ago, and archaeological evidence from the Mehrgarh archaeological site in contemporary Balochistan, Pakistan suggests that people were spinning fibers as long ago as 8,000 years before the present day.
Gossypium Arboreum in an Indian home garden, 2014. Threads from backyard plants are preferred as wicks for household religious services.
Photo by Andrew Flachs.
Ancient Globalization
Cotton held key advantages over flax (Linus usitatissimum L.) or hemp (Cannabis sativa L.) in that these require a time-consuming rotting process called retting to extract weave-able fibers. Sheep and other fiber-producing animals have to be fed and cared for, while cotton can be harvested directly from the plant. As cotton spread across South Asia and the Levant, Indian small farmers placed themselves at the center of a global trade in high-quality clothing that spread north to China, east to Southeast Asia, and west to Rome, North Africa, and East Africa.
Learn more about cotton and global trade before European colonialism:
Households in South Asia paid taxes that built palaces, armies, infrastructure, and civil bureaucracies across Asia through the 15th century. Arab and central Asian traders along the silk road and across the Indian Ocean gained power and wealth by selling textiles along with spices and minerals to buyers in Africa, Europe, Southeast Asia, and China. Meanwhile, farmers bred hardy varieties of crops including cotton outside wet, warm tropical zones across central Asia. By 1000 CE, cotton seeds appear in archaeological sites across the Persian Gulf region to the central Asian highlands. While the spread of cotton through this region pre-dated Islamic expansion in areas like northwestern Uzbekistan, the expansion of trade networks across the silk road helped cotton spread to Beijing, Tehran, and Venice. This trade concentrated wealth through networks of exchange across Eurasia and Africa.
Cotton is a symbol of identity for many people across southern Central Asia. Historians have argued that the dispersal of cotton as a significant crop across West Asia was tied into the Islamic expansion, part of what is sometimes referred to as the Islamic Green Revolution. Both historical and archaeological evidence attests to increased investment in irrigation and the spread of other water-demanding crops such as rice. While cotton textiles rarely preserve in archaeological sites, cotton seeds, as evidence for local cotton processing, are hard and dense and can preserve for millennia if they are presented with the right conditions. A recent discovery of ancient cotton seeds preserved at the archaeological site of Barikot (2700-2100 years old) in the Swat Valley of northern Pakistan studied by archaeobotanist Robert N. Spengler III shows that the people living at this ancient site had a mixture of cultural influences from South Asia and from southern Central Asia. The Swat Valley may have served as a corridor of communication in the ancient world. Cotton was cultivated in these rich mountain river valleys by two and a half millennia ago and may have spread from South into Central Asia around that time. The cotton seeds pictured here were just one among over 10 different crop seeds recovered at the Barikot site. The Swat Valley receives particularly high rainfall and has a mild climate that may have been an ideal ecological pocket for cotton cultivation. Spengler’s team are continuing archaeobotanical investigations in southern Central Asia in order to better understand when cotton made the leap from small-scale garden plant to and industrial-scale cash crop. Understanding this cultural shift will better inform us about the perceptions of cotton in the ancient world and the level of sustainability in the prehistoric cultivation systems. Text and photo, showing ancient cotton seeds from Bairkot, by Robert N. Spengler III.
All four domesticated species of cotton are perennial shrubs or small trees native to the tropical and subtropical latitudes. They do best in areas with long, hot summers, abundant water, and dry conditions towards the end of their flowering period, which protects the fibers from rot. Because they are also salt tolerant, the Old World species G. arboreum and G. herbaceum are great candidates for planting in marginal lands and irrigated deserts. Wild cotton species and certain primitive cultivated varieties are not frost tolerant, however, so they cannot be grown outside of places with frost-free winters, presenting a natural limit to their northern expansion. At some point in prehistory, this was overcome through the “annualization” of Old World cotton varieties – farmers identified and selected early flowering plants that could produce cotton bolls before the freezing temperatures arrived, and through this selection they circumvented the plant’s usual reliance on short daylength triggers for growth response, a process called photoperiodism. This allowed farmers in places with freezing winters to grow a tropical and subtropical perennial plant in novel environmental conditions.
Compilation of archaeological sites containing cotton seeds published by Elizabeth Brite and John M. Marston
It is not entirely clear when or how the first annualized varieties of domesticated cotton arose in Asia, but the current evidence of cotton seeds from archaeological deposits suggests that they are not found at sites lying above the 30-35º latitude until around 1600 years ago. These Gossypium sp. seeds recovered from the site of Kara-tepe in northwestern Uzbekistan (Karakalpakstan region, N 42º) in 2009 provide early evidence for the northern expansion of annualized cotton into temperate regions that are today major centers of global cotton production (Photo by John Marston). The deserts of Karakalpakstan bloom with agriculture when irrigated with water from the Amu Darya River, and archaeological evidence indicates a major expansion of the area’s irrigation systems by around 1000 years ago. This likely helped to expand annualized cotton agriculture across this region. Similar processes probably unfolded in ancient Iran, where Richard Bulliet has documented a thriving cotton economy recorded in Islamic tax documents from commercial centers such as Nishapur, Qom, Isfahan, and Merv around 1000 A.D. From here, goods would have been transported to huge markets in Baghdad and Basra, and a truly global economy of cotton production and trade emerged across the Muslim world. Text by Elizabeth Brite.
Names for cotton in Europe, Asia, and parts of Africa follow trade routes across the Indian Ocean. Many Southern and Western European languages are etymologically related to variations on the Arabic qatn, recalling the traders who brought it to their shores. In Spanish and Portuguese, where Islamic rulers had a lasting influence, the Arabic prefix -al persists as well. In eastern Europe and central Asia, words for cotton trace land routes through Iran and Turkey with variations on pambeh and pamuk. Hindi's kapaas follows trade East through Indonesia and Cambodia, while the Chinese mian influences the Korean myeon. German's baumwolle (tree-wool), with variations across Scandanavia, indicates an earlier misconception about cotton's origins.
Hover over central points to see linguistic links relative to their spread from India, and zoom in to see words in their native scripts.
14th century engraving from The Travels of Sir John Mandeville, first circulated 1357-71. The image suggests the power that cotton held over European imaginations used to wool and flax. Mandeville wrote: “There grew there [India] a wonderful tree which bore tiny lambs on the ends of its branches…[that] bent down to allow the lambs to feed when they are hungry.”
The notion of a plant capable of providing faster, cheaper, lighter, and higher-quality textiles captured the imaginations of Europeans used to wool and linen. Naturalists and clothes wearers alike, aided by the writing of adventurers like Herodotus and Sir John Mandeveille, imagined cotton as a tree that bore tiny lambs who bleated from its branches. Most European languages take their word for cotton from the Arabic qatn or Turkish pamuk as a legacy of the traders who brought it to their shores, but German's baumwolle recalls this misconception.
Mandeville was likely drawing inspiration from Herodotus' The Histories: "There are trees growing wild, which produce a kind of wool better than sheep’s wool in beauty and quality, which the Indians use for making their clothes."
Colonial Cotton
By the mid-15th century, the balance of geopolitical power began to shift toward Europe. Europeans saw in cotton the opportunity to build a new kind of empire, what historian Sven Beckert calls war capitalism: by extracting a surplus of commodities, land, and labor from colonized extra-European lands and workers, empires could fuel urban manufacturing in imperial cores. By the 1700s, cotton grown in South Asia was shipped around the world to be spun and sewn in factories in Liverpool, England, or Lowell, Massachusetts. Finished clothes were worn around the world, purchased for enslaved people, laborers, and middle and upper class fashion connoisseurs. To suppress indigenous weaving systems in colonized societies, England and France enacted tariffs against and ultimately outlawed Indian-produced textiles. Difficult to imagine in the era of fast, cheap clothing, cotton smugglers in 1726 in France could be imprisoned and face execution.
Learn more about the colonial history of cotton:
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The Green Revolution
During India's struggle for independence, Mahatma Gandhi's satyagraha (truth through non-violent resistance) campaigns that involved the spinning and wearing of khadi, hand-spun cloth woven from indigenous cotton. As a result, the charka (spinning wheel) became a symbol of the nationalist movement. The focus on khadi symbolized national self-reliance and resilience and was accompanied by the call for a boycott of British cloth and other goods. Initially successful in building a national identity and breaking from British economic power, Gandhi's vision of socialist-inspired self-sufficient village republics ultimately lost out to a centralized redistribution of wealth based on increased industrial output envisioned by Jawaharlal Nehru. By the late 1960s, after Nehru's death, India's 5-year plans shifted decisively toward capital-intensive agriculture in a campaign that came to be called the green revolution. Urban manufacturing produced farm equipment, synthesized nitrogen fertilizers, and pumped chemical pesticides, while the sudden availability of agri-chemicals, machinery, and water infrastructure led crop breeders to focus on high-yielding varieties and hybrids that would respond to these inputs. As a result, yields steadily rose alongside water infrastructure and applications of fertilizers and pesticides.
Learn more about the green revolution and Indian cotton production:
Paranoid about the links between hunger and communism, the United States initiated a series of agricultural development projects that came to be known as the green revolution: a multinational program to breed crops that could transform industrially synthesized fertilizers into profitable seed heads, link nations through international economic and agricultural exchanges, expand university extension's influence, build irrigation infrastructure, and expand the production of market commodities. American crop scientists, working in Mexico on strains of wheat developed by Japanese farmers, sent machinery, seeds, chemicals, and expertise to India during the 1960s. In doing so, the United States built new political ties with India, while crop scientists expanded their influence in rural parts of the country through new roads, water infrastructure, and extension service. Many farmers across central India are now switching to growing soybean in the monsoon season and wheat in the winter. Soybean was initially introduced by Indian agricultural scientists in collaboration with US scientists from the University of Illinois, a hub of soybean research, in order to address India’s protein deficiency. When the yellow bean failed to find a place in the Indian diet, it found a new function as oil and deoiled cake (DOC) for export as cattle and poultry feed.
To ease the transition to new crops, the American government exported grain through a food for peace (PL-480) program. Recent estimates show that yield growth actually slowed during the green revolution years, although overall crop production continued to increase along a linear trend. Farmers incorporated chemical inputs into extant views of a healthy field ecology, seeing green revolution crops as "weak," in need of pesticide and fertilizer protection. Wealthier farmers benefited disproportionately from these new resources by securing the earliest and deepest tube wells, exacerbating rural inequalities even as farming produced and consumed more resources.
Today, international crop centers like the International Center for Research in the Semi-Arid Tropics (ICRISAT) in Hyderabad promote the continued selective breeding of plants into profitable market commodities or food crops. This vision is illustrated here by a pyramid of crop improvement. Photo by Andrew Flachs.
Global climate change is exacerbating the risks faced by farmers across South Asia. Farmers experience climate change as steadily hotter summers, severe cold spells in the winter, and erratic and intense monsoon rain. Extreme rainfall events in central India have tripled between 1950 and 2015. Anthropogenic climate change exacerbates the risks created by the legacies of the Green Revolution: high-yielding seed varieties, intensive use of chemical inputs and the cultivation of water-guzzling crops. State-promoted, input-intensive monoculture has transformed cultivation into an enormous gamble for farmers by limiting crop diversification. Moreover, short-duration soybean has enabled multiple crop cycles through the agricultural year including water-intensive wheat and risky, weather-sensitive horticultural crops such as cauliflower and potatoes. Soybeans dry in a farmer's home in Malwa, Madhya Pradesh. Photo and Text by Tanya Matthan.
Farmers who grow single crops like soybean or cotton every monsoon season are unable to pay off debts when that crop fails because of extreme weather events or heightened disease and pest attacks. Many then go further into debt to invest in a second crop. Rather than confront the structural risks of cultivation through investment in land redistribution, agricultural research, and storage facilities, the Indian government has responded with financialized programs such as crop insurance. Insurance is intended to provide income stability, encourage economic development, and promote the cultivation of high-value crops even as it emerges as a crucial mechanism of climate adaptation. Yet, insurance coverage can encourage the cultivation of water guzzling crops. Moreover, the nature of index insurance is such that payouts are made on an area basis, which means that losses on individual farms are not necessarily compensated. This exacerbates vulnerabilities and inequalities among farmers. Water-damaged soybeans are threshed and weighed to calculate yield loss and make insurance claims in Malwa, Madhya Pradesh. Photo and text by Tanya Matthan.
The changing logics of Indian agriculture rippled into cotton, where breeders worked to create plants that would respond to the new normal of pesticides, fertilizers, irrigation, and state subsidies adopted across the country. By 1998, Indian cotton farmers were applying over 30,000 metric tons of pesticides, accounting for nearly half of all pesticides sprayed in the country. Despite growing cotton for centuries, Indian farmers faced a crisis of pesticide use, pest attacks, and rural instability at the turn of the century.
Gosspyium hirsutum lacks resistance to key insect pests and its root is shallower than other species of cotton. To grow this crop to its full potential, farmers defend it with pesticides and dole out more regular and gentle water than monsoon rains provide. With increasing sprays came increasing insect resistance, a kind of pesticide treadmill in which farmers must spray ever more to combat insects' evolving tolerance to those poisons. Photo by Andrew Flachs.
Contemporary cotton production is dominated by China, India, the USA, Pakistan, and Brazil, which together account for about 75% of global cotton production. Each of these nations also commits considerable resources toward subsidizing farmers through state buying programs, subsidized chemical inputs, and trade negotiations. Production in China, the USA, and Brazil tends to be highly mechanized. To recoup the cost of expensive harvesters, tractors, and crop inputs like fertilizers, water, and pesticides, farmers grow crops in large, centrally managed fields. In India and Pakistan, average farm sizes tend to be much smaller. Here, farmers often use machinery through cooperative cost-sharing agreements or employ human labor for sowing, managing, and plucking. In the Telangana fields described in the sections below, an average cotton farm size was about 5 acres, with an unusually large farm being larger than 12 acres.
This map and graph use data collected by the Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations ( http://www.fao.org/faostat/en/#data/QC ). Darker shaded countries produce more cotton. Click the legend icon on the bottom left or on specific countries for more details.
Bt Cotton: A Farmer's-eye View
The rise in fertilizers and pesticides brought new debts and insecurities, including a wave of farmer suicides that peaked in the late 1990s and has not receded. As India embraced neoliberal policies that relaxed price protection for farmers and introduced new international products, farmers learned to navigate an unfamiliar landscape of credit, labor, seeds, and citizen consumption. Farmers could get rich by selling cotton but weighed these aspirations against rising costs in rural life, new fees for social services, and the rise of fabulously wealthy upper class.
While national-level analyses are correct that farmers are not more susceptible to suicide than anyone else, poorer, non-irrigated, more marginal farmers are at greater risk for socioeconomic ruin and suicide. This crisis is complex and multifaceted, the result of systemic policies and hard choices made by India's central government. In India, agrarian distress, cotton, and suicide have become inextricably linked because suicides coincided with the first legal plantings of genetically modified (GM) Bt cotton and certified organic cotton regulation. These two systems of production and distribution, mutually incompatible because of legal restrictions that prevent GM products from securing organic certification, are a rallying cry for those demanding answers to India's agrarian distress.
Commercially released in 2002, Bt cotton illustrates many of India's agro-environmental paradoxes: the promise of high-tech modernity as well as the threat of eroded past values; the influx of new capital and technology amid the danger of increased corporate control; and the acquisition of new farming methods at the risk of interrupting farming learning processes. More than 95% of all cotton planted was genetically modified within twelve years of its initial introduction. Yet, the simultaneous explosion in available seed choices has complicated the particular seed decisions that farmers make. Early research showed that farmers came to plant GM seeds not for an observed yield benefit but because they achieved fad-like popularity in their villages, a trend that intensified by 2013.
Unfortunately, in this highly speculative environment, the desire for good yields can be very far from taking concrete steps to achieve them. Data since 2012 show that there is no yield rationale to choosing particular seeds, that farmers gamble by switching seeds frequently, that farmers themselves do not know very much about the seeds they are planting, and that the market is increasingly confusing. Farmers choose seeds amidst a deluge of marketing, competition, consumption, and the persistent erosion of experiential knowledge. Yet a farm is a public stage that invites the gazes of neighbors and visiting scientists. The hope for yield glosses a range of aspirations to stay on land, be successful, make good choices, and ultimately live well. But as part of the lives of cotton farmers, these seeds limit the futures imagined by growers. This new normal of the farm masks a deep ambivalence about what it means to farm well.
Learn more about Bt cotton in India:
Zoom in on the map below to explore Bt cotton's journey across Telangana
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Seed breeding and genetic engineering
Plants transformed at plant science stations like ICRISAT (depicted here) or by private companies are bred into local hybrids where their seeds are collected for sale by private companies and university scientists. Through public-private partnerships, public scientific research in agriculture is shared with private seed breeders to develop new commercial seed lines.
2014 Flachs Interview excerpt, private seed breeder: "There were a lot of issues with the non-Bt production: a lot of bollworms, whiteflies, sucking pests, and so it was very difficult to produce the cotton at all...At the time [we] chipped in and there was the Bollgard technology which was available. There was a lot of need in India at that time...In the rural sector they used to spray cotton almost every alternate day. So the complete rural community used to have pollution, the pesticides, every alternative day because there were a lot of pests in the cotton...All the local companies have access to university germplasm, the public breeders. They go there and select the lines [that are] more adaptable to Indian conditions."
When asked later, an extension plant scientist explained that they keep experimenting with non-Bt varieties of cotton in case there is a disaster or a sudden commercial interest in cotton that is not genetically modified. "We have to continue the research to sustain the germplasm," she explained.
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Agrarian debt
Bt Cotton is prominent in narratives of agrarian distress in India and is widely linked to farmer debt and even suicide. Why then do farmers still cultivate Bt cotton? Political ecologist Vaishnavi Tripuraneni found that farmers frequently reply that they grow cotton: “To get a good yield”; “With the hope of getting a profit”; “(We) thought that our situation will improve, and we will do well if we plant cotton”; and most importantly “to repay our loans”. While Bt cotton cultivation deepens farmer debt, it also appears to be caused by debt.
According to India's Directorate of Economics and Statistics, more than 80 percent of agricultural households in Telangana, India, are indebted. Farmers borrow at the start of the agricultural season for their laagodi (agricultural investment) and ideally repay the loans with their crop harvests. In reality, agricultural debts are also debts for day to day life. Some of the biggest loans are for reproductive costs including children’s weddings and medical expenses.
Bt cotton is part of the agricultural intensification undertaken by farmers in response to existing debt, primarily, reproductive debt. To repay these loans farmers hope to make agriculture more profitable by investing in capital intensive technologies such as drilling borewells and planting Bt cotton. They choose Bt cotton (despite not really knowing what ‘Bt’ cotton is) a relatively new and increasingly popular crop in southern Vikarabad district, Telangana, as it fetches a higher market return compared to other crops cultivated in the region (such as pigeon pea, millets, green gram, groundnut, rice, etc.). Bt cotton, which has a high water requirement, is cultivated at the expense of more traditional drought tolerant crops. However, most of the agriculture in this drought prone region is rainfed. A majority of the drilled borewells never hit water due to groundwater overexploitation. Thus, the hope of a good cotton harvest is a gamble, and when the crop fails, farmers fall deeper into debt. Photo and text by Vaishnavi Tripuraneni.
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Seed selling
Dozens of agricultural input shops line the street near Warangal's train and bus stations. Small shops sell seeds, fertilizers, and pesticides to farmers who live in the rural areas surrounding Warangal, a city of over a million people. Each of these are sold at a maximum retail price, which regulates supply and pricing at private shops. As a consequence, shops have a lot of difficulty in distinguishing themselves or gaining a competitive edge because all products cost the same at each shop. Still, farmers usually buy inputs on credit, allowing additional interest or mysterious extra fees to accumulate beyond the fixed prices.
2013 Flachs fieldnote excerpt: The environment is overwhelming - dozens of shops with slick owners in suits wearing gold watches selling to farmers in dhotis. There are several dozen shops, which helps to explain why farmers have difficulty remembering which particular shop they visited to buy their seeds. Ultimately, the name of the shop is less important for many than the name of the seeds or inputs they're buying. The owner of one shop explains the recent craze for seeds from the Kaveri company. All shop owners seem to agree on this point, scoffing that the farmers are fools for thinking Kaveri will be significantly different, especially as the only real difference in the seeds relates to the bolls size, density, and pickability - those with larger bolls, are harder to pluck but heavier and thus more remunerative at the market. Those with medium bolls are denser and easier to pick, and thus cheaper to harvest. Why the enthusiasm for Kaveri this year, I asked one shop owner: "Crazy farmers!" he said.
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Farm fields
Farmers sow cotton in June, in time to receive an initial deluge from the summer monsoon rains. Most also plant rice and maize, and farm work is supplemented by an active wage labor economy including construction, agricultural work, and rural white color jobs. Bt cotton seeds are dusted with a bright pink imidacloprid treatment to ward off insects that would attack germinating plants. For the next six months, farmers spray their fields for pests unaffected by Bt cotton, spread fertilizers, plow, weed, and water. By the end of October, cotton is ready to be harvested, almost always by hand, and taken to the open-air markets where it is sold. Success in cotton is defined largely by yields, and so the desire to reap large harvests dominates farmer decision-making. The effort to produce high yields comes as other rural safety nets and diversified farming are shrinking in cotton-growing regions, a symptom of a larger push to promote neoliberal capitalism in rural India through open markets and ever-higher individual production. Cotton monocultures are relatively input-intensive for farmers and for the lands they work in the sense that they require frequent fertilizing, weeding, and pesticide spraying. After several seasons of this farm fields can lose soil fertility and moisture content, leaving the land exhausted and ill-suited to further cultivation. The residents of Enterprise, Alabama discovered this as well, but felt trapped in cotton's cycle of debt and harvest. During a 1916 boll weevil infestation, farmers finally switched to peanut and later brought back cotton as part of a diversified agriculture. In 1919, the citizens of the town erected a statue in the heart of the business district to thank the boll weevil for providing a wider source of income.
2013 FIachs fieldnote excerpt: In this thanda (village outside the village proper where ethnic Banjara people outside the Telugu caste system live), there are just one or two motorcycles between the families, so most people get around by walking into town to catch the bus or an autorickshaw. This is in part because the road is uneven and washed out, and is more or less impassible by heavy carts, cars, or lorries due to a series of dips and spillovers from the nearby lake. [V] decided to spray today because the clouds suggested that the morning rain wouldn't hold. In haste, he bought pesticides from a village shop with limited inventory that later turned out to be expired. "I knew that [R] sells expired pesticides," he told me, irritated. "But there wasn't time to to go to Warangal for something more powerful." He went out with a motorized pump that spewed fumes with a deafening roar, leaking gasoline all over him. [V]'s friend walked up and down the rows of cotton with no mask, spraying a constant cloud of poison into his face. It was about 100 degrees that day, and soon we all had a pesticide mist on our skin. Mine was by far the lightest, as I didn't get too close to them. [V] carried a metal pot of water mixed with pesticide behind him, filling it when necessary, The machine, about 40 pounds when full, sputters and grows lighter as you walk. [V]'s younger brother was tasked with bringing potfuls of water to the field for the mixing. At one point he overfilled the sprayer causing the temperature to cool and the motor to sputter and stop. The men quickly took it apart and cleaned the corroded bolt at the top of the engine, using a pair of underwear to wipe it and gasoline to bubble away the burned pesticide. It took four hours to spray this six-acre field..."It was a waste," he told me a few days later. "Only a third of the insects died." "What if this one doesn't work either," I asked. He shrugs. "I'll have to get something even stronger." This is the obvious answer.
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Cotton Weeding
Agricultural labor on Telangana farms is often gendered, in part because local norms and labor law enforcement allow women to be paid less than men. In cotton fields, hired teams of female laborers weed and pick cotton, while men or women from the household tend to do the sowing, plowing, and spraying. In keeping wages for female workers lower for these time-intensive and labor-intensive jobs, farmers can keep more of the income that they will eventually gain from selling their cotton at the market. While men are the more visible faces buying and selling cotton, women's daily labor sustains farms - not just through regular crop management but through the expectations of running rural households, including caring for young children, caring for elder parents, cooking, gathering firewood, and bringing water
2012 Flachs fieldnote excerpt: After visiting her field to deliver instructions to a all female team of laborers from a nearby Scheduled Tribe thanda, [K] gave us tea and talked about some of the changes in farming she had seen and about her use of local wild and plants (adavi mandi, or forest medicine). In the 1970s they had a large family, farmers never went to markets, knew many crops, knew all the adavi mandi, and ate only millet chapatis. There is a profound sense of disappointment from a lost and better past. Now, she continues, we eat rice which "gives no stamina". Instead, everything is full of sugar that gives diabetes. Nowadays, people don’t know how to eat or farm. Everything is commercial, all of her friends are sick and have no strength. "People are like Bt," she says, waving toward the cotton fields: hybrids with no inner strength, something that needs to be bought new each year. [K] took us around her family compound (she was part of a larger landowning family, allowing her more space for her garden and the status to hire and carefully watch Scheduled Tribe laborers) where she showed us a Neem trees, tamarind, custard apple, papaya, lemon, jujube, and a large vegetable patch. She says that many people still know about these local plant medicines, and that she teaches all her children and grandchildren as this is very important knowledge. "But," she sighs, "it is getting more rare."
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Cotton plucking
The highest cost for a farmer growing cotton is in labor. Human hands sow seeds, weed crop fields, drive bullocks when plowing, load pesticide sprayers, and ultimately harvest crops. Rice cultivation, which requires communal coordination on irrigation, transplanting, and harvesting, often uses labor exchanges or percentages of the harvest to bring workers together. While farmers with very small holdings can use household labor or labor exchanges to manage their crop, most of the work ends up being done by teams of female laborers and hired workers from historically marginalized caste and tribal communities. Many farmers specifically hire teams of women because they pay them less than men. In 2014 in Telangana, one kilogram of plucked cotton earned a laborer 15 rupees (~.20 USD). A day of picking cotton involves hunching and squatting to rip cotton lint from the bolls. Over time, lint scratches fingertips and forces its way under fingernails. Cotton fields have very little shade, so farmers try to start early in the day to avoid the worst of the heat. Although Bt cotton has diminished the use of many of the most virulent pesticides, which targeted bollworms, pesticides for non-target pests persist on cotton plants touched by the largely young and largely female labor force of weeders and pickers.
The video above was shot in 2016 by Andrew Flachs. In it, a landowner laments that his field only received half of what he expected to yield, saying with exasperation that he and others in other states will plant different crops in the following year. Behind him, a hired team of female pickers pluck cotton. In this case, many of these pickers belong to the Banjara Scheduled Tribe community, who live in comparatively poorer communities outside the village proper and do not belong to the Telugu caste system.
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Farmer's market
Cotton can be plucked several times during a typical season. Increasingly, because of late-season infestations by Pink Bollworms and increasing labor costs, farmers will uproot their crops and burn them after the first plucking. By sowing maize in those fields, farmers can earn more with a low-maintenance crop.
2013 FIachs fieldnote excerpt: We piled into the back of an autorickshaw along with six fertilizer bags repurposed to carry cotton. The first stop at the market is a scale, where we get a receipt with the approved weight. Cotton, rice, and maize are weighed, bagged, and graded by dealers wearing gold watches. Insults fly at every stage. The seed is subpar, the cotton is dirty, the fibers are too brittle. There is a dance, where buyers offer prices, endure the protestation of farmers, walk away to be called back for more haggling. The rice must be free of impurities, dry when you reach your hand in it, uncracking in your hands when you squeeze them, and of uniform color and size. Cotton is graded on color, presence of spots and bits of wood, length of fiber, strength of fiber. "No one got the full price today," said [E] bitterly. "We never get the full price. The private sellers will grade you and pay you that day if you take it, but the government takes a month at least to pay - who can wait that long?"
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Local gin and press
From the market, cotton is trucked to nearby gins, where machines remove the seeds, workers sweep cotton lint into presses, and then the cotton is pressed into 480 pound bales. From there, the cotton is shipped to factories where it will be spun, dyed, woven, and transformed into clothing sent around the world.
The video above was shot in 2016 by Andrew Flachs.
Organic Cotton: A Farmer's-eye View
As with GM seeds, the proponents of organic agriculture tout its potential to cure agrochemical overuse, reverse nutritional deficiency, combat poverty, and bring domestic products to new markets. No GM cotton can be legally sold in organic markets, regardless of how it is produced, and so organic programs work diligently to build trust across this supply chain. While some field trials have shown that organic cotton can deliver profits comparable to GM cotton grown with chemical inputs, organic farmer yields documented in ethnographic research are significantly below those of GM cotton. Organic cotton development projects including the Centre for Sustainable Agriculture and Chetna Organic buffer low yields through infrastructure and subsidies, including free seeds, seasonal jobs, equipment, loans, or easier access to government programs. However, there are social benefits as well, as these farmers earn celebrity in the news and on social media, they travel to farms or conferences in other states, and they discover a new platform to speak to neighbors and visitors. In essence, organic programs provide an alternative stage on which to achieve rural wellbeing.
It would be a mistake to conclude that these spaces are performative and thus illegitimate. Rather, the ways that organic programs reduce vulnerability, create social capital, and create new reward structures to ensure farmer success make them sustainable. A main factor driving India's agrarian distress is the pressure for good yields and the lack of an alternative way to achieve success - organic agriculture provides this through a social and material safety net that other Telangana farmers lack. By recognizing farmers as partners and stakeholders looking to take advantage of new opportunities, development programs (including organic cotton cultivation) have been seen to foster social relationships over short-term input incentives. When organic projects fail to establish trust and mutually respectful working relationships, farmers often leave the program.
Learn more about organic farming in India:
Zoom in on the map below to explore Organic cotton's journey across Telangana
01 / 08
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Seed supply
Because the vast majority (~95%) of cotton seeds sown in India are genetically modified, organic project managers often source seeds from the same major companies that provide seeds for the majority market. To slow evolutionary resistance to GM cotton's Bt toxins, all Bt seed packages commercially sold contain a smaller amount of non-Bt seeds. These refugia seeds are intended to be planted in a border around the crop field or intermixed in the field so that pests are drawn to them instead of the commercial plants. This lack of non-Bt seeds is a major challenge for organic growers. These seeds are fertilizer- and water-intensive hybrids bred for conventional agriculture conditions, and so underproduce on fertilizer-free, rain-fed organic farms. Although these are the only seeds currently available, organic NGOs and companies are working with breeders across India to increase their options.
2013 Interview with NGO project manager: "What we are now trying is to have an evaluation of cotton varieties. And in cotton we have already started breeding for new varieties and hybrids. We’re launching a new initiative. We call it: the open source seeds initiative. These seeds can be freely exchanged with others or freely produced locally...For cotton we took up breeding for the last 3 years. So now this season we’ll be requesting some of the varieties and hybrids which we have...I will bring some seeds from this place or that place. Wherever I go I talk to farmers, and they say 'this seed is doing well.' So then we bring the seeds and we give it to the farmers they try it in their fields and come up with the data. Then we publish it as a catalog. We have a catalog of value for cultivation and use. For every variety: what is the value of cultivation in my field in this particular situation, they record the total situation, what is the agronomic character, what is the pest reaction, disease reaction, drought reaction. So, people record all these things and they also record the use, market sales, what the preferential market is. So based on that farmers make it easy for other farmers to make a choice. Finally in black soils this variety performs better, in red soils this variety performs better, in shallow soils this variety. That kind of data is recorded by the farmers...[Another program] started procuring the non-Bt version of the same hybrids. Then, farmers also began saving some seeds from those hybrids. In cotton inbreeding depression is not that high because its not a highly cross pollinated crop. Outcrossing is only five to fifteen percent, so if careful selection can be made, you can manage it."
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Seed distribution
Once procured by organic program professionals, seeds are brought to regional offices, sorted, packaged, and given to farmers for free or at a heavily subsidized rate. In addition to non-Bt cotton seeds, farmers also participate in state- or project-sponsored programs where they receive seeds for food, crop, trap, oil, and other useful plants. Although these programs do not typically buy non-cotton crops, they promote agricultural biodiversity and food security as a cushion against total reliance on the fickle cotton market. By providing these seeds, organic programs can be sure that the seeds farmers sow are not genetically modified and thus will not compromise the integrity of the value-added label.
2014 Interview excerpt with NGO project manager: "The cost of cultivation is less for organic farming because they don’t buy chemicals from external shops and the seed is procured from the cooperative so the seed cost is less compared to the Bt seeds. If you see the overall cost, if you do the cost-benefit analysis, it’s almost equal. Even if they get a higher yield with Bt cotton, its, you know, same. Comparing cost of cultivation, they get same thing...In this case, what [the cooperative] does is generally distribute seeds to the farmers or they distribute seeds to the farmers they give different varieties. They give castor, some pest control crops, lentils, all sorts of things that will hep with soil health management and pest control and food security. So for these, we give many seeds to the farmers so they can sow them in their field. It’s a kind of balance thing."
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Organic certification
Farmers wishing to grow and sell organic cotton to a global market cannot simply declare themselves to be organic, fill out paperwork, and access buyers around the world. To make this supply chain function, India has adopted international certifications first developed in the Untied States - including, most importantly for cotton, that no farm grows GM crops. Without the authority conferred by international consensus and clearly defined standards for organic certification, Indian organic exports would lose their added value in foreign markets. For national certification and access to foreign organic markets, inspectors of farms and processing facilitates are accredited by national agencies that oversee regulatory compliance. One of the most important selling points for foreign markets is TraceNet, an electronic database of quality assurance data collected by operators and producers within India’s organic supply chain. Programs may create their own certifying documents or partner with third party certifiers to keep track of all this documentation. The work of collecting this information and entering into these databases makes the larger organic supply chain possible.
2018 Flachs fieldnote excerpt: The certification office itself is tucked away in a winding culdesac northeast of Hyderabad, built like a small house. It is crammed with binders going back five years containing all the paper details of farm certification. Files are everywhere. They cover every wall, tumble out of filing cabinets, and teeter on the top of bookshelves. Staff, about fifteen younger women crowd around several computers where they are inputting data for Tracenet and APEDA (a national certification registry). When I arrive, two brokers have come to ask about the benefits of organic agriculture for their millet processing facility. They are considering selling to restaurants, high-end caterers, and possibly exporting. Their main interest is in buying in bulk, building a facility near Visakhapatnam, and then adding value throughout the area and across to international buyers as well. They don’t know much about the process, and so [U] had to explain to them that the farms need to be certified, that different countries have different import requirements, that processors need different kinds of certifications, and that the organics need to be separate from non-certified goods. They start to look worried, and so she switches from a hard business line into a reassuring adivsory tone. “Its not difficult, you can easily comply,” she says. They relax a little. "The biggest thing," she stresses, "is documentation. You need to keep track of farms, inputs, yields, seeds, buying, plowing, land records, storage, selling, annnnnnni (Telugu = everything)” she says, switching from English to Telugu, stretching it out dramatically, because “we trace everything…not only through your records but through our software in the central government." Later, I say that it seemed like they didn’t know really what organic farming is all about, She laughs. "That’s my job, to educate people about what this means and to build my client base."
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Organic cotton farming
In published literature and in my own studies, the average differences in yield between organic and Bt cotton agriculture are stark. Because organic agriculture in many countries is tied to land remediation or the socioeconomic development of marginal farmers, yields can be highly variable. Still, they tend to be at least 10–25 percent lower than comparable non-organic production. These organic farmers are often recruited because they live on more marginal land, so one should expect them to have lower yields anyway. Further, the seeds organic farmers plant are most often fertilizer- and water-intensive hybrids bred for non-Bt refuge areas by GM hybrid seed breeders and so underproduce on fertilizer-free, rain-fed organic farms. Farmers work closely with program managers and leaders living in the village to develop intercropping plans, mix homemade pesticides, build vermicompost and manuring pits, and troubleshoot unexpected problems. Many farmers growing organic cotton benefit from equipment, seeds, and access to government schemes. In doing so, they trade lower yields for a rural socioeconomic safety net.
2014 FIachs fieldnote excerpt: [J] agrees that [cotton seed brand] Mallika is better this year than Bunny to grow well given late rains and bad soil conditions, while Bunny does well only for the most favorable conditions, Thus, he's sowing two acres of Mallika to Bunny's one. Why sow cotton and these crops at all? "They come and give us the seeds, so why go to outside shops and look for something else," he laughs. "If we need more seeds due to germination failure, the group will give to us. We are farmers so we have to sow food for ourselves. Besides, look around: we can't go to the market. Before organic we didn't know about these leaf sprays," he says, gesturing to a barrel of neem, chili pepper, garlic, and cow urine fermenting into a nostril-burning liquid. Really, I asked? You didn't know about spraying for insects? "Well, of course we knew that the pests were there, but we didn't know what sprays worked for which pests and which different pests were doing what. When I was small there were no insects and no facilities like schools or buses, so everyone did the farmwork. We healed ourselves with local medicines from the forests and people weren't sick like today. Now there are hospitals, no one wants to do farmwork. They want to leave the village and go to school, they're sick in hospitals not using our own medicines. Before no crops needed fertilizers or pesticides, but now they all need these, these urea and others have made the plants weak."
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Adding value through stories
Organic cotton is, fundamentally, a value-added product premised on stories about development and environmental sustainability. Sustainability within organic agriculture assumes that elite consumers will pay premiums for ethical nonchemically managed cotton, while producers will sacrifice higher yields in favor of value-added markets and long-term socioecological benefits.To secure a certified organic label, farmers submit to audits as well as to visits from donors who want to use their stories of empowerment or development to add value for consumers at the end of organic cotton’s supply chain. In addition to these official audits, farmers, program intermediaries, and clothing sellers all work together to create narratives that add value to organic cotton beyond the official label. Organic programs sell cotton by telling consumers about farmers who are isolated, poor, and in crisis. This is not a misleading description. By and large, the Telangana farmers who work with organic development groups are indeed isolated, poor, and navigating levels of agrarian distress. Yet, the story is complicated. Many farmers, like the one pictured above, have gained new celebrity and new material resources by working alongside organic projects. In doing so, all parties shape these narratives and learn to perform roles within them. Many Telangana organic cotton farmers shrug when asked to describe organic cotton consumers. “I can’t say what happens to the cotton after it leaves the farm,” replied one farmer in 2018. “It becomes cloth, of course, but I’ve never seen it in any shop. Maybe you buy it in America or Hyderabad”. They don’t sell the clothes in Asifabad,” reasoned another farmer, referencing the commercial and transportation hub of this district. “So how can we know what they are like?"
2014 interview with organic project manager: How much you want to ignore that it’s about money, it is still about that. So in a way we go over there try to create markets for [the farmers]. So to the extent that there’s a market, there is no assurance, even if it’s organic – forget about Fairtrade. Because the difference between Fairtrade and organic is, the way I look at it as a consumer, if I want to buy organic it’s for my benefit also because it’s going to touch my skin, blah, blah, blah. Like for food I try to buy organic food as much as possible of course, but Fairtrade has got no value for the consumer as such. It’s still the same product. So it’s the same banana or it’s the same shirt, but if you tell people that this is the impact it has, which is minimal in a way what they have to pay. Which is like, five pence for one tee-shirt. For the farmer it is quite a bit. So we sit there and we create markets and at the same time we campaign about it so that people are aware what Fairtrade does and what its impact is.
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Local collection for distribution
Unlike organic farms in countries like the USA, where organic markets are well established and consumers trust regulatory apparatuses, Telangana farmers hoping to sell organic cotton cannot simply declare themselves to be organic and sell to foreign buyers or urban elites. Rather than face this as individual households, organic cotton farmers join forces with development programs, including NGOs and corporations who bridge gaps in marketing, regulation, quality control, and transportation between farms and buyers. As a corporation and cooperative, they organize farmers into village, district, and state buying and selling groups that partner with other cooperatives and companies to buy and sell certified organic cotton. These commercial and development motivations are often synergistic, as international organic cotton retailers benefit by publicizing the ways in which their products contribute to socioeconomic growth, education, modernization, and village livelihoods (broadly defined). By storing cotton locally and selling with partner organic groups, farmers save on transportation costs and gain convenient access to new markets.
2013 interview with organic project manager: "Generally we pay it via a check so there is a kind of transfer. Farmers need on time seeds availability, meaning they need seeds when they really want to sow them. That is one issue. Then, when they want to sell [their cotton] they have to be able to sell it. If they don’t have any place to keep the cotton and all, they have to sell it immediately. If they want to keep it, maybe its gets spoiled and that’s an issue. So this cooperative and producer company, makes such arrangements. We hire some groups as guards and all they keep the cotton there for some time and store it. And then, others farmers get payment in one week or two weeks and ours get immediate payment. And they get a better payment from us than from the local buyers. It means they get some organic premium, plus there's fair trade premium goes to the cooperative. That is the advantage they have. And even if they don’t get a better payment from all of this, then there’s a kind of competition locally. Now that we are there, we are actually giving more than the market price so the local buyers are also forced to buy at a higher price. Even if [our farmers] want to sell in the open market we don’t restrict them [and they earn a higher price than they would have previously]."
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Gin secured for organic processing
Even if farmers follow all organic protocols and rural professionals correctly document every step of their process, cotton can still become contaminated at a ginning facility if it is mixed with cotton from conventional farms. In one well-publicized scandal, Swedish clothing manufacturer H&M sold fraudulent organic clothing revealed to contain Bt cotton. The resulting inquiry, led by Germany’s Financial Times, found that as much as 30 percent of certified organic cotton from India contained Bt genes and thus could not have been grown by organic farmers. One likely site of contamination was not the farm field but the gin, where cottons from different sites were mixed and became indistinguishable. To combat this, organic projects will rent out a gin for an entire day, giving the facility enough time to clean out other cotton and process a single larger order. Gins sell cotton, seeds to the rare farmers who wish them, and pressed patties of cotton seeds called oilcakes that can be fed to livestock as a fattening agent.
2014 Flachs fieldnote excerpt: Stopped by a small mill that sees very little desi [Gossypium herbaceum] and pays the workers Rs 300 [~5 USD] per day. Then went to a mill owned by a friend of the organic program. He's also a very large farmer with about 230 acres. The gin is huge, and there are brokers who pick up the seed and bring it to the gin, saving farmers a trip (although sometimes measuring it dubiously). He comments that other gi managers believe Bt is best as it makes the farmers more money, saves on sprays, and is associated with better yields (although he recognizes that water and fertilizers have a lot to do with this) than non-Bt cotton. To his way of thinking, the situation used to be worse in this area. At least now farmers are producing enough to be somewhat comfortable. He's used to contamination procedures and while its not a strain on him to do a bunch of desi or organic in a day and clean the gins, it can be tough for the farmers to get to him in the kind of volumes that would be worthwhile. He therefore has suggested in the past that they go to closer and smaller gins. Who buys the seeds, I ask? Scheduled Tribe farmers will sometimes buy seeds as a cheaper option, and he says that he keeps the rates low and sells them only large, healthy looking seeds because they're already impoverished. Otherwise, almost no one buys seeds. He's a constant tinkerer, and as we talk he interrupts himself to point out small modifications to the assembly line that he's made to improve efficiency or increase the amount of fat in the oilcakes so that dairies will pay a higher rate for them.
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Markets beyond India
As in India, Central Asian farmers are entangled with global dynamics. Central Asia has been transforming into a cotton frontier in recent years. The ending of the boycott of Uzbek cotton triggers new interests by global brands, and more importantly, cotton from Central Asia gains traction as various textile brands face pressure to stop procuring cotton from Xinjiang. The Chinese state (itself) has also recognised the potential of cotton production in Central Asia and alongside smaller projects, invested significant amounts of capital in Tajikistan’s cotton-textile sector. Additionally, organic cotton firms have recently entered the Central Asian cotton sector. Whilst their presence is still limited, as opposed to India, firms feel there is less GM cotton sown in the region and thus less risk of GM contamination.
Particularly for this last reason, Central Asia offers an alternative to cotton producing nations like India. Such relocations are complex, as the companies involved use farmers to enable – safeguard – capital accumulation, and benefit, as it were, in a country like Tajikistan, from the fact that production of cotton happens under force of the state. Whereas organic cotton firms tend to contract farmers and supply inputs on credit, overall the cotton sector is elite-controlled, and outside of this organic cotton niche farmers are left to their own devices to deliver high yields (to meet production targets), sow the right seeds, and apply the right fertilizers and pesticides. The cotton seed market is opaque and many farmers distrust seed names or qualities and rely on kin or trusted authorities to make their choice. Amid a rich choice of Tajik, Chinese, Turkish, Uzbek, or Australian seed varieties, many farmers complain that there are no “clean” seeds. Instead, they incur high costs by sowing large quantities of seeds to secure against a low yield. Photo and text by Irna Hofman.
Making Textiles
Whether it began life as an organic seed or as a GM seed, cotton pressed into bales is then trucked to factories where it is spun, woven, and dyed. Here, cotton grown by farmers in India may be mixed with cotton grown around the world, depending on the procurement prices of the day, trade agreements that lower or raise tariffs on cotton from other nations, and the national stocks held in storage. These mills are complicated sites for domestic workers and foreign buyers.
National markets around the world liberalized during the 1980s by cutting social welfare and agricultural subsidy programs to concentrate on selling commodities to a wider and more diverse set of buyers around the world. This privileged higher export volumes and led states, including India, to increase production as a way to keep commodity prices low and competitive on the global market. To keep a competitive advantage, states like Vietnam and Bangladesh, which do not produce much cotton, as well as China, which produces less cotton than it needs to feed its mills, concentrated on building factories where they could process cotton into value-added cloth. To keep prices low and global trade preferable, these countries have created tax incentives and offer limited labor, health, or building code enforcement to workers.
Many industrial jobs pay better than rural laborers could earn otherwise. They also provide steady employment for women who have fewer prospects in urban or rural labor markets. These jobs allow workers to support families, pay school fees, and invest in their futures. However, they are not always safe, remunerative, or otherwise good places to work. Daily, monotonous work in unsanitary, hot, crowded, dusty, and otherwise unsafe conditions grinds away at worker health while providing wages as low as $0.15 per hour. These payments may be delayed or cut, with little enforcement from labor laws or collective assistance from worker unions. Many workers are additionally women from historically marginalized communities in the places where they work, placing them at additional risk for sexual harassment or wage theft.
Some factories flout labor and safety laws, and catastrophes such as the 2013 Rana Plaza collapse of a factory outside of Dhaka, Bangladesh do not seem to spark structural change. In fact, as development economist Alessandra Mezzadri shows, failures of these health, labor, and safety regulations are critical to keeping finished textiles cheap for consumers around the world. In some cases, voluntary and value-added labeling such as Fairtrade or certified organic can ensure certain safety standards for workers and farmers. However, these certifications require new relationships of trust and oversight if they are to be successful.
Learn more about mills, garment workers, and finishing textiles:
01 / 09
Retail Cotton
Finished cloth is then cut, stitched into clothing, and sent to retail shops around the world. The World Trade Organization estimates that global textiles and apparel exports totaled $820 billion US dollars in 2018. All of this clothing requires a vast financial infrastructure to facilitate trade between and within nations, as well as a vast physical infrastructure of shipping lanes, highways, and distribution networks that bring textiles to store shelves. As states reorganized their economies in the 1980s to drive down global prices in commodities like cotton, privately held global corporations played an increasingly important role in buying and selling textiles. Rather than assume the risks of the entire supply chain, which might run the gamut from bollworm attacks to factory strikes to sudden demand for different styles, textile and apparel corporations have focused more narrowly on buying and selling clothes on the global market.
By outsourcing clothing production, clothing companies also distance themselves from unsafe or illegal conditions in suppliers' facilities. A wave of reforms under the umbrella of corporate social responsibility increased transparency and regulation in the 1990s, but the overall structure has remained the same: farmers, brokers, ginners, millers, and shippers, and clothing sellers each assume their own risks, and the most remunerative part of this value-added supply chain ends up being the finished product. Tragedies like the Rana Plaza factory collapse or the slow violence of harassment and poor working conditions continue at garment factories around the world. Meanwhile, global demand for fast fashion has only increased. This globalized supply chain also unevenly distributes the environmental consequences of clothing trade, with lower-income countries also bearing a heavier burden of polluted water, carbon dioxide emissions, public health, and land degradation.
Once they arrive at stores, retail workers, a predominately female, insecure, non-unionized sector of the economy, sell apparel to consumers who have imagined their identity and affiliations through garments and the people who make them. With the increased prevalence of online marketing, physical stores and malls have struggled to compete for a dwindling consumer base interested in shopping in person. Clothing stores have weathered this transition better than other retailers because consumers like to check specific fits and styles, but in-person retail suffered greatly as a result of the 2020 COVID-19 pandemic.
Learn more about retail clothing and labor:
Secondhand Clothing
Fashion cycles are fast and speeding up. Increasing clothing consumption means that people then get rid of it by donation, resale, or in their municipal waste. The United States Environmental Protection Agency estimates that US Americans saw 11.2 million tons of clothing enter landfills in 2017. Second-hand clothing is a popular market across the Global North, where thredUP, a clothing resale company, estimates that retro styles and comparatively cheaper clothing will be part of a $64 billion global circular market by 2024. India, which does not import second-hand clothing, has a thriving domestic resale market where old clothing is transformed into new furnishings or exported west, as anthropologist Lucy Norris shows.
Thrift stores and trendy consignment shops appeal to fashion-minded consumers while donation-based stores like Goodwill and the Salvation Army offer high-quality used clothes at discount prices. These stores absorb some of the clothing discarded in the cycle of fast fashion, but they are highly selective. Resale shops do not stock clothes that they think will not sell because they have damage or are too unfashionable. Not all of these clothes sell, and so resale stores will pull them off racks after a few weeks or months. Ultimately, these stores can only keep a fraction of the clothes they receive. Along with charitable organizations, resalers who accept clothing donations package and sell them to recyclers and exporters.
Textile recyclers will buy torn and damaged fabrics for rag or stuffing materials, but most clothing that is not sold in local resale markets is repackaged and resold across the Global South, an export market estimated to be about $4 billion in 2018. While providing cheap clothing, these clothes also depress local clothing industries and undercut domestic entrepreneurs who cannot compete with donated clothes that are produced for next to no costs. On these grounds, various governments, from Haiti to India and South Africa, have opted to ban imports of some kinds of used clothing from some nations.
In 2016, the members of the East African Community, a regional economic bloc that included Rwanda, Kenya, Tanzania and Uganda, pledged to phase out used clothing imports within a three-year time period to promote local textile and footwear industries. Alarmed by these discussions, the industrial association representing 40,000 US used clothing packagers and shippers asked the US government to intervene on their behalf and threaten preferential trading access to those countries. Shortly thereafter, Kenya withdrew its commitment to the policy. In July 2017, the US government called for an out-of-cycle review of EAC countries’ eligibility for preferential access to the US market, causing Tanzania and Uganda to withdraw as well. Only Rwanda stuck to the ban, and they did indeed lose access to the US market for their clothing exports in March 2018. Kenya has temporarily banned imports during spring 2020 because of the coronavirus.
The US sanction demonstrates the lengths to which governments in the Global North will go to protect their industries, even if it comes at the expense of the ability of governments in the Global South to promote their own. It also illustrates the power that governments of rich countries can exercise in the global economy. Almost by definition, richer countries are desirable export markets, because goods can command higher prices there. This means that losing access to their markets will always be costly for poorer countries. Because in most cases market access can be governed unilaterally, rich governments almost always have this tool at their disposal. Rwanda shows that it is possible for countries in the Global South to resist this threat, but typically only if the government can afford the political and diplomatic costs of falling out of favor with countries in the Global North. This is not a straightforward criteria to meet given long-standing inequalities of power.
As incomes rise in countries buying used clothing, consumers across Asia, sub-Saharan Africa, and Central America who previously bought cheap off-season clothes are becoming more brand and fashion-conscious. For those who are fashion conscious but lack the disposable income to purchase new brands and styles, local garment entrepreneurs will copy and innovate on fashion industry brands. Knockoff clothes allow people around the world to be part of new styles and exercise creative talent.
Learn more about second-hand markets and counterfeit clothing here:
Slide the map to compare used clothing exporters (left, red) with used clothing importers (right, blue). Countries with darker shades have higher trading values ($USD million). Click on specific countries for details. Data from the OEC
01 / 07
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Fashion shows
Fashion designers and brands showcase new styles for upcoming seasons in glamorous, public events like Fashion Weeks, which take place in influential fashion capitals like Milan, London, Paris, or New York. Recognizing growing markets outside of Europe and North America, fashion events are becoming popular in cities like São Paulo, Mumbai, Jakarta, Shanghai, and Dubai. Milan Fashion week, photo by Bruno Cordioli ( https://www.flickr.com/photos/br1dotcom/4388580245/ ).
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Secondhand Clothing for Local Markets
Secondhand and vintage clothing is popular around the world, where old or retro styles are sold alongside cheap, used popular brands and cuts. Some shops specialize in high-end or vintage clothes, buying and selling a range of products. Others like Goodwill or the Salvation army run on donations and accept a high volume of clothing that is eventually sorted. Many people also donate clothes to charitable organizations like the YMCA or Oxfam. Image from Google Maps.
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Secondhand Clothing for Global Markets
Used clothing is a big business across the world, where shipping containers of clothing not bought in local markets arrive for purchase in foreign cities, where it is bought by weight and then sorted for local tastes. Charities partner with international brokers to sell millions of tons of old clothing. These cheap clothes provide garments for communities across Africa, Central America, Eastern Europe, and Asia, while depressing local textile industries. Ultimately, cheap second-hand clothing can put small-scale garment workers and mills out of business because they cannot compete with such low prices. Yet, as anthropologist Olumide Abimbola shows, used clothing merchants also come to influence and standardize this trade by working with apprentices across the supply chain to ensure that the best quality and style clothing is sent from exporting nations. In doing so, fashions in Eastern Europe or West Africa come to exercise sway over used clothing exports in the UK or the USA. Second-hand market in France, photo by Lionel Allorge ( https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/User:Lionel_Allorge ).
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Salaula Fabrics and Careful Selection in Zambia
Sensationalist news media accounts tend to describe the global export of secondhand clothing as the dumping of the West’s no-longer-wanted garments on poor consumers, for example in Africa. Anthropologist Karen Tranberg Hansen writes about a counter-narrative based on her research on secondhand clothing in Zambia:
A very striking observation from my research into this process in Zambia concerns the name local people give to our used clothing: salaula. The name means approximately, in the Chinyanja language, ”selecting from a pile in the manner of rummaging.” Without any reference to the West, this name graphically captures the process that unfolds once a bale of imported secondhand clothing is opened in a local market and potential customers eagerly congregate to choose desirable or needed garments from an abundant supply. Because labels often have been cut off or removed, brand names and content descriptions may be missing. What motivates the selection of specific garments is a combination of quality/style/price. Low-income consumers care a lot about fabric quality and neatness of sowing in part because of the rough treatment the care of clothing requires. Hand-washing with strong detergents in cold water is hard on fabrics and sewing, and drying outside in the sunshine easily makes colors fade. All garments are ironed to prevent putzi fly larvae from hatching in the seams and entering the skin, causing possible infections. The quality control by customers when shopping from salaula involves careful touching, folding and wrapping of fabrics. This is where ”cotton” enters even though the garment may not have a descriptive label that specifies fabric and country of manufacture. And the ”made in ” listing is frequently not identical with the country where the fiber is grown. Although consumers in Zambia may not be able to identify Indian cotton, they most certainly know the quality difference between polyester and cotton in the entangled global commodity journeys their preferred secondhand clothes have traveled. Text and image by Karen Tranberg Hansen.
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Apparel Exports to the Global North
While used clothing donations can suppress local markets, countries like Rwanda and Uganda export clothing back to India, the United States, and other nations. Fine Spinners is a foreign-owned, vertically integrated firm in Uganda with a lead time – i.e. the time it takes to turn an order into a delivered product – on par with Chinese, Pakistani and Indian competitors. Fine Spinners produces both for domestic and regional markets, but it is especially export-oriented. The firm supplies Bon Prix, Jack Jones and other globally known Wbrands. Their second biggest end market is the US. The firm was responsible for about one third of total shirt exports in 2016. In this photo, workers assemble clothes for the domestic market on the left. On the right is the export-oriented assembly line, to which workers who have proven their worth in the former assembly line can graduate. Photo and text by Emily Anne Wolff.
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Knock-off Fashion and Local Tastes in Guatemala
Even as fast fashion companies produce over 60 million tons of clothing a year to keep clothes stylish and cheap, there is a vibrant global market for fake branded clothes. Anthropologist Kedron Thomas describes how local artists in communities like the Guatemalan highlands make and sell knockoff brands while adding their own skillful touches to the designs:
Clothing manufacturing took off in Tecpán, a Guatemalan highland town in the 1960s. Today, consumer demand powers a thriving market for knockoff fashions. Local manufacturers modify brands or add their own sense of style to keep up with local trends and changing tastes. The knockoff market makes it possible for people who can’t afford brand-name clothing sold in malls and online to wear the latest styles. Lower prices are not the only difference between “originals” and “fakes” in highland Guatemala, though. It is common for designers and manufacturers to change up the designs and materials to adapt popular fashions to local tastes. They may change the color when imitating a brand-name polo shirt, or modify the cut of a pair of designer jeans, for instance. This is an important aspect of local market competition, and also a way to show off one’s design talents and fashion sensibilities. The global market in knockoffs frustrates fashion companies who seek to enforce intellectual property laws that protect their brands and logos. Under pressure from the fashion industry and the United States government, countries around the world have strengthened these legal protections in recent decades. While pushing to protect its own intellectual property, however, the industry continues to resist labor regulations, unionization efforts, and environmental protections that would improve the lives of its workers and the health of the planet. Text and image by Kedron Thomas.
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Regional Markets for Old and New Cotton
San Francisco El Alto is the wholesale hub for the highland apparel trade, serving not only Guatemalan clientele but also retailers and manufacturers from southern Mexico. All kinds of cotton textiles and apparel are traded there -- traditional huipiles and cortes, imported and locally-manufactured children's clothing, imported and locally-manufactured knockoff fashions, second-hand clothing sorted by type and spread out across tarps, and rolls of cotton cloth offered at wholesale prices. This photo is from the San Francisco El Alto market, showing cotton tops made in Guatemala, likely from imported cloth. Photo and Text by Kedron Thomas.
At each step along this global commodity chain, people work to bring forth material objects as well as stories about themselves and the people they imagine to be complementary to their own roles. As a daily commodity, cotton is all around us, part of the invisible infrastructure of how we live and present ourselves to the world. In every stage from seed to recycled shirt, some people find ways to benefit and live the kinds of lives they wish to live, while others find themselves exploited by local systems of power and authority. There is precarity at each stage in this supply chain, borne disproportionately by women and historically marginalized communities. The stakes of this danger are not always equal, either - while retail workers struggle to get by, farmers and garment workers are exposed to pesticides and dangerous working conditions as a daily fact of their labor.
The story of cotton stresses the danger of seeking technological fixes for problems rooted in complex agricultural, political, social, and historical issues. In part, this is because the practice of sustainable agriculture on the farm, let alone the global challenge of feeding or clothing the world, is a social, and not technological, question. India’s cotton sector has become increasingly capitalized over the past twenty years, first through pesticides and hybrid seeds, and now through herbicides and GM seeds. This drives positives, like increases in urban industrial production, export, and gross domestic product, as well as negatives, like rural inequality, the dissolution of rural safety nets through neoliberal policies, and farmer suicides. Genetically modified Bt cotton was not a cause but rather one among many contributing factors to this balance.
This complexity can be a frustrating conclusion for people who want to work toward solutions to difficult global problems. I hope that readers consider how unintended consequences are drawn out by the sociopolitical forces and historical conditions under which people live. Maps like this argue for a more anthropological engagement with communities in need, one that privileges an understanding of root, social causes by understanding how we live in a connected world. It all begins with a seed.
More Resources
Check out other studies of the cotton supply chain below:
Contributors
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ArcGIS Survey123
Crowdsourced clothing map
