Aparna Sharma unveils Earthsight’s report that links deforestation to some of your favourite fast-fashion brands.
The UK-based investigative Non-Governmental Organisation (NGO), Earthsight, spent more than a year analysing court rulings, satellite records, and shipments from the Cerrado region, a popular cotton-growing region in Brazil. They went undercover to a few trade shows, and their findings showed that up to a million tons of cotton have been linked to land grabbing, largescale illegal deforestation, violence, and corruption. They traced the supply chain of this tainted cotton and found that they were sent to factories in Asia, which make garments for Zara and H&M.
The cotton estates in this region are owned by some of Brazil’s richest families, and some of the finished products from this tainted cotton have sustainable production labels on them. According to Earthsight, the sustainability certification process called ‘Better Cotton Initiative’ used by these brands was fundamentally flawed. The industrial-scale farms in the report are among Brazil’s biggest cotton producers, and they have a long record of court injunctions, corruption rulings, and millions of dollars in fines related to clearances of around 100,000 hectares of Cerrado wilderness.
Earthsight tracked 816,000 tons of cotton from the investigated estates to eight Asian firms that, in a year, made nearly 250 million items of clothing and homeware for global stores of H&M, Zara, and Zara’s sister brands Bershka and Pull&Bear, among others. The main destinations were China, Vietnam, Indonesia, Turkey, Bangladesh, and Pakistan. Over half the Cerrado region has been cleared for large-scale agriculture, mostly in recent decades. According to estimates from the Brazilian government, the destruction creates climate impacts equivalent to 50 million more cars on the road each year. Hundreds of species now face extinction due to habitat loss. Each year, billions of litres of fresh water are diverted to cotton fields that are doused with 600 million litres of the most poisonous pesticides.
Environmental researchers are concerned that the demand for cotton, which is a thirsty crop, is creating problems for the local communities, and it is driving them off their land which they have used for grazing for many generations. According to Mauricio Correia Silva, a research consultant, “Communities have lost access to plateaus that have natural pastures where cattle used to graze.”
Rubens Carvalho, head of Deforestation Research at Earthsight told Deutsche Welle, a German-based international broadcaster, “It’s shocking to see these links between very recognisable global brands that apparently don’t make enough effort to have control over these supply chains to know where the cotton comes from and what kind of impact it causes.”
Earthsight director Sam Lawson said: “While we all know what soy and beef have done to Brazil’s forests, cotton’s impact has gone largely unnoticed. Yet the crop has boomed in recent decades and become an environmental disaster. If you have cotton clothes, towels or bed sheets from H&M or Zara, they may well be stained by the plundering of the Cerrado. These firms talk about good practice, social responsibility, and certification schemes; they claim to invest in traceability and sustainability, but all this now looks about as fake as their highstreet window arrangements. It has become very clear that crimes related to the commodities we consume have to be addressed through regulation, not consumer choices. That means lawmakers in consumer countries should put in place strong laws with tough enforcement. In the meantime, shoppers should think twice before buying their next piece of cotton clothing.”
Aparna Sharma is a non-conformist who believes that fashion must become a force for good and style must meet sustainability. She breaks down the nuances of slow fashion and how we can stay stylish without being trendy.
