RECOMMENDATIONS

Your customers care about sustainability, and they’re counting on you to change your behaviour today - not in five years’ time.  When it comes to the cotton value chain, you have the greatest share of money and influence and it’s your duty to be a driving force for good.
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To do this, we suggest you:

1. Go beyond just purchasing 100% of cotton from certified sources, and take responsibility for improving sustainability in your value chain and the conditions under which your products are grown and made. Your due diligence must also include cotton farming, meaning you and your partners must identify, mitigate, and remedy risks from the root.
2. Partner with, and financially invest in, smallholder farmers to adapt to climate change and adopt agroecological farming practices before it is too late.
3. Update your purchasing practices to ensure they do not create perverse incentives or reduce income for producers.
4. Raise the bar on transparency: know exactly where your cotton comes from, demand your partners prove their impact and help consumers understand sustainability challenges in your supply chain.

For the full details on how you can do better, read the Cotton Papers.

Certification owners play a crucial and unique role in the cotton value chain. However, to build global recognition and withstand future crises, you will have to involve farmers in your work even more. You need to both broaden and improve your impact. To do this, we need you to:

1. Urgently facilitate retailers and brands partnering with smallholder cotton farmers so they significantly increase their financial investment in climate change adaptation.
2. Adopt ambitious strategies, including price premiums and mechanisms, to guarantee living incomes for smallholder cotton farmers.
3. Consider where your standard can adapt to cover under-represented sustainability issues (see the certification benchmarking for more information).
4. Raise the bar on transparency: know exactly where your cotton comes from, demand your partners improve their impact and help consumers understand sustainability challenges in your supply chain.

By demonstrating your impact, you can future-proof your standards and build a lasting legacy. You can also enhance your legitimacy by involving and amplifying farmers’ voices. 

For the full details on how you can do better, read the Cotton Papers.

As farmers, especially smallholder farmers – producers of the majority of the world’s cotton – you are the most important people in the cotton sector. You deserve a healthy environment, a greater share of the sector’s value, and support to adapt to climate change.

Our recommendations provide guidance on what both individual farmers and farmer organisations should consider.

1. For farmers, our recommendations cover:
   • Switching to more environmentally-friendly farming
   • The importance of producer organisations
   • Crop diversification and
   • Sharing your voice
2. For farmer organisations, we recommend:
   • Training on responsible farming practices
   • Improving access to safer alternatives to agrochemicals and
   • Providing useful market information

Read the detailed recommendations in the Cotton and Climate paper. 

As traders, you are the cotton sector’s gatekeepers. If you choose, you can open up the value chain, connect retailers with farmers, and make transparency and traceability the norm. With these possibilities in mind, we ask you, among other things, to:

1. Proudly embrace traceability
2. Use your purchasing practices to guarantee a living income
3. Use sustainable farming as a prerequisite for commercial arrangements
4. Proactively support producers who are transitioning to more sustainable production
5. If you are involved in cotton production, work to empower smallholder farmers, not control them

For the full details on how you can do better, read the Cotton Papers.

As a producing nation, we want you to support a living wage and income, and fair conditions for cotton farmers and workers. We also recommend you do everything in your power to enable sustainable production that supports communities, climate and the planet. 

To do this, we suggest you use public policy to drive change in the areas of price support mechanisms that enable a living income, and reward cotton that is grown more sustainably.

Our recommendations include:

• Repurposing agricultural subsidies.
• Regulating agrochemicals; and
• Facilitating international retailers and brands to connect with smallholder farmers and support farmer organisations.

For more detail, see the recommendations in full in the Cotton and Climate Paper.

Standards, CSOs, and responsible companies are stepping in to compensate for government failure to regulate irresponsible businesses. But their efforts alone are not enough – we need meaningful regulation.

As a cotton-consuming country, we recommend you work to plug the global governance gap. To do this:

• Adopt or enhance due diligence legislation.
• Ensure all relevant legislation and regulations explicitly include the right to a living income and wage, fair and safe working conditions, and access to robust redress schemes.
• Regulate sustainability claims by retailers and brands.

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You should also use your position to promote sustainability by:

• Establishing multilateral partnerships with producing countries.
• Ensuring competition law does not prevent market players from working together on pricing to ensure a living income for smallholder farmers.
• Creating tax incentives for the import of cotton products from certified sources.
• Introducing or enhancing measures, including changes in subsidies, to support a managed transition away from synthetic agrochemicals.
• Modelling good purchasing practices by sourcing your own cotton products from certified sources.

For the full details on how you can do better, see the Cotton and Climate Paper.

As part of a multi-stakeholder initiative, you play a critical role by providing a forum and implementing interventions to address issues in the cotton value chain. Therefore, you need legitimacy. For this, you need to listen to, and involve, smallholder farmers in your work. 

We want to see you play your part, not only in ensuring companies are doing the bare minimum and sourcing 100% of their cotton from certified sources, but by ensuring cotton provides farmers with good livelihoods and is environmentally sustainable through increased investment in training. 

For the full details on how you can do better, read the Cotton Papers.

Your civil society organisation can bring insight and expertise to the table, but only if you:

• Find multi-stakeholder initiatives that align with your mission, reach out, and begin the process of joining.
• Support standards and MSIs to prove their impact, and verify their sustainability claims.

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Bring people together to make a difference:

• Engage more in supporting smallholder farmers in their transformation for growing cotton more sustainably.
• Build farmer and worker organisations’ capacity so they can make their voices heard.
• Collaborate with other civil society organisations to unite behind common calls for action.

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Be the sector’s conscience:

• Target those who are lagging behind, not the frontrunners.
• Be public in documenting unsustainable practices. Show the world the ugly power of price pressure practices, and lay out the path toward improvements in the sector.

For more details on how you can do better, see the Cotton and Climate Paper.

Use your influence! Buy from brands with public and ambitious sustainability commitments that include:

• Guarantees that small-scale cotton producers get a decent income.
• Direct support for small-scale cotton producers to adapt to climate change.
• Sourcing all of their cotton from certified sources.

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Commit to being a critical consumer:

• Be wary of vague claims that sound like they’re sustainable. Look for clear, quantified claims.
• Demand complete traceability and transparency.
• Ask questions, look for original sources, and don’t share unverified claims.
• If you find misinformation, call it out. And if you unintentionally share misinformation, alert your community.

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Be a conscious consumer:

• Buy less and repair what you have. Swap, transform, sell or donate what you no longer need.
• Get involved in campaigns for more sustainable cotton by Fashion Revolution and the Cotton Campaign, for example.
• Learn more about how cotton clothing is produced and what needs to change for it to be more sustainable in the Cotton Papers.
• Share the parts that interest or surprise you on social media and get others involved!