World Cotton Day 2025
Photo by Lily Miller on Unsplash
Today is World Cotton Day, an opportunity to focus on this natural fibre that forms the foundation of modern life. Cotton's versatility is unmatched: it’s the resilient backbone of your reliable denim, favourite T shirts, comfortable bedding but also used in sanitary products and medical supplies, and even a crucial component in banknotes. It's a commodity that supports the livelihoods of roughly 100 million households globally.
It is right to celebrate this powerful, renewable resource. However, to be truly objective and constructive, we must scrutinise its journey and acknowledge the hidden costs.
Cotton's most persistent criticism is its reputation as an aggressively water-intensive crop. While irrigated cotton cultivation in arid areas certainly demands significant water resources, this isn’t the entire picture. The high water demands of irrigated cotton cultivation have been directly linked to significant ecological crises globally. The most severe and globally recognised example is the near-total desiccation of the Aral Sea in Central Asia, where the water from its feeder rivers, the Amu Darya and Syr Darya, was unsustainably diverted to irrigate massive cotton fields. This disaster serves as a potent reminder of the devastating environmental and social cost of mismanaged agriculture in water-scarce regions.
Beyond Central Asia, similar water stress is evident in other major basins. In the Indus River Basin (Pakistan and India), for instance, cotton is a water-intensive crop, and agriculture accounts for over 90% of the river's diverted water, contributing to water scarcity, pollution, and long-term threats to the Indus Delta and its dependent communities. Furthermore, in the Murray-Darling Basin in Australia, large-scale irrigation for cotton has been a major factor in the over-extraction of water, resulting in severely reduced river flows, devastating fish stocks, and causing chronic damage to the basin's delicate ecosystems. These examples underscore that while rain-fed cotton is a sustainable alternative, large-scale irrigated cotton in vulnerable river basins remains a critical challenge to global water security.
The real challenge lies not with the plant itself, but with the consumption rate. The disparity between the enormous investment of land, time, and water required to grow a single boll, and our culture of 'fast fashion' disposal, is unsustainable. We are consuming garments at a pace that trivialises the resource commitment of every crop grown. The cultivation cycle itself represents a significant commitment, typically requiring 4 to 6 months from sowing to the opening of the mature boll. While mechanised harvesting is extensive in developed economies, much of the world's crop is still harvested by hand in developing nations, a process that is intensely labour-intensive. This effort is predominantly carried out by women; in major cotton-producing countries like India and Pakistan, women make up the majority of the agricultural workforce and can account for up to 90% of the hand-picking labour, often performing the most demanding and lowest-paid work.
Fortunately, cotton possesses inherent attributes that position it as a leader in sustainable solutions. Crucially, as a natural, plant-based fibre, it is fully biodegradable at the end of its life, directly contrasting with synthetic fabrics that repeatedly shed microplastics into our environment.
The industry is shifting towards climate-smart agriculture. By adopting techniques like regenerative farming - which focuses on soil health, using cover crops, and reduced tillage - growers are enhancing the cotton plant’s natural ability to sequester carbon from the atmosphere. This is positioning sustainable cotton as a crop that could potentially become climate-positive.
World Cotton Day must serve as a pivotal point for consumers. Our fix is simple: value the fibre by demanding transparency, supporting initiatives like organic, regenerative cotton and CottonConscience as well as critically consuming less, this way we honour the extensive journey cotton takes and the people involved in that journey.
Respect for this powerful, renewable fibre is one of the most sustainable fashion statements we can make.