By Alia Malik, Chief Commercial Officer
When I looked at a box of cereal I was feeding my kids this morning, I saw a story about Nestle supporting individual farmers on their regenerative transition. If the food industry recognises the value of supporting growers to drive a regenerative transition, are we doing enough in the fashion and textile sector?
It’s not hard to see the opportunity that regenerative agriculture offers our sector.
Cotton farmers, from India to the US, are under pressure. Cotton prices have not grown in real terms since the 1970s and given the pressure of unpredictable weather patterns and market dynamics – it isn’t easy being a cotton farmer these days. Allied with the threats of soil degradation, increasingly high input costs and input scarcity – it is understandable that many cotton farmers are increasingly questioning the long-term viability of staying in the game. And without cotton farmers there is no cotton. The future of the cotton t shirt is not secure if things don’t change – do we really want to move from plant to plastic?
The good news is that many key actors within the fashion and textile industries are alive to this threat. Many companies are setting ambitious targets for their sourcing and increasingly turning to regenerative materials. But where are these going to come from when they typically have no direct relationship with growers or even the immediate tiers facing the growers?
The Better Cotton Initiative (BCI) has a unique role to play here. BCI operates at scale – working in 14 countries and certifying 25% of global cotton and 1.5 million farmers against our standard. Since our inception over 20 years ago, we have recognised the critical importance of investing in environmental transformation, protecting biodiversity and looking for ways to support and incentivize, to adopt more sustainable practices and drive change at field level.
Farmers need partnership and support to make big changes, which typically means taking on new risks, and trying new practices that are not guaranteed to work or deliver immediate returns. So, an effective regenerative transition is about giving back to the land, rather than taking from it but it’s also about ensuring farmers have what they need to make this journey.
The market has a critical role to play– not just in setting regenerative targets but actively partnering with farmers and sharing the burden of the transition. This could look like taking on the first loss or rewarding documented practice adoption with forward contracts and better prices.
This is no small ask – either for the farmers or for industry. But if we get this right, there are wins for everyone. Regenerative practice adoption can help protect the environment and produce healthier more resilient soils – delivering a win for nature. Those soils need fewer inputs to produce good yields, representing a win for the grower. And the resilience and dependable product supply it fosters is a win for industry and the market.
This is why at BCI we see the regenerative transition as an essential step for the entire value chain and why we are becoming a regenerative standard system – in which not just our field level standard but all aspects of our work are focused on helping farmers to adopt regenerative practices and helping industry to source the cotton they grow.
