Top fashion designers and models are championing "clean cotton" on behalf of the Environmental Justice Foundation, a nongovernmental group that hopes to call attention to the cotton industry's alleged connection to pesticide poisoning, child labour, environmental depletion and thousands of deaths a year.
The campaign, called "Pick Your Cotton Carefully," sells organic and fair-trade cotton T-shirts. The foundation hopes to ban cotton produced through forced child labour and to expose the use of pesticides in central Asia and West Africa that it calls deadly.
"Without a doubt it kills people and it kills wildlife," said Juliette Williams, the foundation's co-founder.
In the United States, organic cotton is probably the most common "green" fabric. Wal-Mart is now the biggest seller of organic cotton products worldwide.
The British campaign follows the foundation's three-year investigation into trade and agricultural practices of cotton worldwide.
But Terry Townsend, the executive director of the International Cotton Advisory Committee - which promotes the cotton industry - says these companies are misinformed. He said that many of the problems identified by activists do not reflect the industry as a whole.The cotton industry employs 350 million people worldwide and produces about 24 million tonnes of cotton a year. Only 48,000 tonnes of cotton are produced by organic and fair-trade sources each year - not enough to meet demand, Townsend said.
The cotton industry was valued at US$32 billion in 2006, but activists claim sharecroppers in developing countries rarely see profits from their work and some wages are so low that parents often send children to work for supplemental income.
The foundation's booth at fashion week is among environmentally conscious designers who already buy organic and fair-trade materials.Among them is 26-year-old Sarah Lucy Smith whose quirky underwear line, "GreenKnickers," was among the first brands to be awarded a fair-trade certification.
"It's really simple - people die to make our clothes when we make things that are not fair trade," Smith said. "I think if people really understood the reality they'd probably say, 'I'd rather be naked' than wear something that someone had to die to produce."
