Cotton Horizons – April 2025

Regular readers will be familiar with what happens when you destabilise a cotton agro-ecosystem: pest and weed resistance, a proliferation of highly-damaging pests, urgent applications of increasingly strong “remedies”, followed by some attempts to restore balance, and indeed, “regenerate” the system. Parts of the world seem to be applying the same approach to the political ecosystem right now.

In our cotton world, this has consequences. Not just in reduced aid and support, but in market demand, or the removal of support to address problems such as forced labour.