The Global Lives of Indian Cotton

Project conceived and designed by Andrew Flachs, with contributions from Elizabeth Brite, Maura Finkelstein, Karen Tranberg Hansen, Sandip Hazareesingh, Irna Hofman, Tanya Matthan, Alessandra Mezzadri, Meena Menon, Robert N. Spengler III, Kedron Thomas, Vaishnavi Tripuraneni, Udaanta, Jonathan Wendel, and Emily A. Wolff. Text and media by Andrew Flachs except where otherwise noted. This map is best viewed on a computer.

Five to ten million years ago, a member of the Malvacea plant family, which includes okra (Abelmoschus esculentus L.) and ornamental hibiscus (Hibiscus rosa-sinensis L.) branched off from its relatives and evolved twisting, waxy hairs along its seed coat. The fibers of this new Gossypium genus may have been intended to enlist birds in dispersing seeds, they may have been a ploy to sail along the wind like dandelions (Taraxacum officinale L.), or the hairs might have acted like an umbrella to keep the rain off the seeds. Yet as cotton continued to evolve, it attracted an unexpected helper drawn to those threads - human beings.

Learn more about cotton genetics and origins:

Cotton held key advantages over flax (Linus usitatissimum L.) or hemp (Cannabis sativa L.) in that these require a time-consuming rotting process called retting to extract weave-able fibers. Sheep and other fiber-producing animals have to be fed and cared for, while cotton can be harvested directly from the plant. As cotton spread across South Asia and the Levant, Indian small farmers placed themselves at the center of a global trade in high-quality clothing that spread north to China, east to Southeast Asia, and west to Rome, North Africa, and East Africa.

Learn more about cotton and global trade before European colonialism:

By the mid-15th century, the balance of geopolitical power began to shift toward Europe. Europeans saw in cotton the opportunity to build a new kind of empire, what historian Sven Beckert calls war capitalism: by extracting a surplus of commodities, land, and labor from colonized extra-European lands and workers, empires could fuel urban manufacturing in imperial cores. By the 1700s, cotton grown in South Asia was shipped around the world to be spun and sewn in factories in Liverpool, England, or Lowell, Massachusetts. Finished clothes were worn around the world, purchased for enslaved people, laborers, and middle and upper class fashion connoisseurs. To suppress indigenous weaving systems in colonized societies, England and France enacted tariffs against and ultimately outlawed Indian-produced textiles. Difficult to imagine in the era of fast, cheap clothing, cotton smugglers in 1726 in France could be imprisoned and face execution.

Learn more about the colonial history of cotton:

During India's struggle for independence, Mahatma Gandhi's satyagraha (truth through non-violent resistance) campaigns that involved the spinning and wearing of khadi, hand-spun cloth woven from indigenous cotton. As a result, the charka (spinning wheel) became a symbol of the nationalist movement. The focus on khadi symbolized national self-reliance and resilience and was accompanied by the call for a boycott of British cloth and other goods. Initially successful in building a national identity and breaking from British economic power, Gandhi's vision of socialist-inspired self-sufficient village republics ultimately lost out to a centralized redistribution of wealth based on increased industrial output envisioned by Jawaharlal Nehru. By the late 1960s, after Nehru's death, India's 5-year plans shifted decisively toward capital-intensive agriculture in a campaign that came to be called the green revolution. Urban manufacturing produced farm equipment, synthesized nitrogen fertilizers, and pumped chemical pesticides, while the sudden availability of agri-chemicals, machinery, and water infrastructure led crop breeders to focus on high-yielding varieties and hybrids that would respond to these inputs. As a result, yields steadily rose alongside water infrastructure and applications of fertilizers and pesticides.

Learn more about the green revolution and Indian cotton production:

The rise in fertilizers and pesticides brought new debts and insecurities, including a wave of farmer suicides that peaked in the late 1990s and has not receded. As India embraced neoliberal policies that relaxed price protection for farmers and introduced new international products, farmers learned to navigate an unfamiliar landscape of credit, labor, seeds, and citizen consumption. Farmers could get rich by selling cotton but weighed these aspirations against rising costs in rural life, new fees for social services, and the rise of fabulously wealthy upper class.

While national-level analyses are correct that farmers are not more susceptible to suicide than anyone else, poorer, non-irrigated, more marginal farmers are at greater risk for socioeconomic ruin and suicide. This crisis is complex and multifaceted, the result of systemic policies and hard choices made by India's central government. In India, agrarian distress, cotton, and suicide have become inextricably linked because suicides coincided with the first legal plantings of genetically modified (GM) Bt cotton and certified organic cotton regulation. These two systems of production and distribution, mutually incompatible because of legal restrictions that prevent GM products from securing organic certification, are a rallying cry for those demanding answers to India's agrarian distress.

Commercially released in 2002, Bt cotton illustrates many of India's agro-environmental paradoxes: the promise of high-tech modernity as well as the threat of eroded past values; the influx of new capital and technology amid the danger of increased corporate control; and the acquisition of new farming methods at the risk of interrupting farming learning processes. More than 95% of all cotton planted was genetically modified within twelve years of its initial introduction. Yet, the simultaneous explosion in available seed choices has complicated the particular seed decisions that farmers make. Early research showed that farmers came to plant GM seeds not for an observed yield benefit but because they achieved fad-like popularity in their villages, a trend that intensified by 2013.

Unfortunately, in this highly speculative environment, the desire for good yields can be very far from taking concrete steps to achieve them. Data since 2012 show that there is no yield rationale to choosing particular seeds, that farmers gamble by switching seeds frequently, that farmers themselves do not know very much about the seeds they are planting, and that the market is increasingly confusing. Farmers choose seeds amidst a deluge of marketing, competition, consumption, and the persistent erosion of experiential knowledge. Yet a farm is a public stage that invites the gazes of neighbors and visiting scientists. The hope for yield glosses a range of aspirations to stay on land, be successful, make good choices, and ultimately live well. But as part of the lives of cotton farmers, these seeds limit the futures imagined by growers. This new normal of the farm masks a deep ambivalence about what it means to farm well.

Learn more about Bt cotton in India:

As with GM seeds, the proponents of organic agriculture tout its potential to cure agrochemical overuse, reverse nutritional deficiency, combat poverty, and bring domestic products to new markets. No GM cotton can be legally sold in organic markets, regardless of how it is produced, and so organic programs work diligently to build trust across this supply chain. While some field trials have shown that organic cotton can deliver profits comparable to GM cotton grown with chemical inputs, organic farmer yields documented in ethnographic research are significantly below those of GM cotton. Organic cotton development projects including the  Centre for Sustainable Agriculture  and  Chetna Organic  buffer low yields through infrastructure and subsidies, including free seeds, seasonal jobs, equipment, loans, or easier access to government programs. However, there are social benefits as well, as these farmers earn celebrity in the news and on social media, they travel to farms or conferences in other states, and they discover a new platform to speak to neighbors and visitors. In essence, organic programs provide an alternative stage on which to achieve rural wellbeing.

It would be a mistake to conclude that these spaces are performative and thus illegitimate. Rather, the ways that organic programs reduce vulnerability, create social capital, and create new reward structures to ensure farmer success make them sustainable. A main factor driving India's agrarian distress is the pressure for good yields and the lack of an alternative way to achieve success - organic agriculture provides this through a social and material safety net that other Telangana farmers lack. By recognizing farmers as partners and stakeholders looking to take advantage of new opportunities, development programs (including organic cotton cultivation) have been seen to foster social relationships over short-term input incentives. When organic projects fail to establish trust and mutually respectful working relationships, farmers often leave the program.

Learn more about organic farming in India:

Whether it began life as an organic seed or as a GM seed, cotton pressed into bales is then trucked to factories where it is spun, woven, and dyed. Here, cotton grown by farmers in India may be mixed with cotton grown around the world, depending on the procurement prices of the day, trade agreements that lower or raise tariffs on cotton from other nations, and the national stocks held in storage. These mills are complicated sites for domestic workers and foreign buyers.

National markets around the world liberalized during the 1980s by cutting social welfare and agricultural subsidy programs to concentrate on selling commodities to a wider and more diverse set of buyers around the world. This privileged higher export volumes and led states, including India, to increase production as a way to keep commodity prices low and competitive on the global market. To keep a competitive advantage, states like Vietnam and Bangladesh, which do not produce much cotton, as well as China, which produces less cotton than it needs to feed its mills, concentrated on building factories where they could process cotton into value-added cloth. To keep prices low and global trade preferable, these countries have created tax incentives and offer limited labor, health, or building code enforcement to workers.

Many industrial jobs pay better than rural laborers could earn otherwise. They also provide steady employment for women who have fewer prospects in urban or rural labor markets. These jobs allow workers to support families, pay school fees, and invest in their futures. However, they are not always safe, remunerative, or otherwise good places to work. Daily, monotonous work in unsanitary, hot, crowded, dusty, and otherwise unsafe conditions grinds away at worker health while providing wages as low as $0.15 per hour. These payments may be delayed or cut, with little enforcement from labor laws or collective assistance from worker unions. Many workers are additionally women from historically marginalized communities in the places where they work, placing them at additional risk for sexual harassment or wage theft.

Some factories flout labor and safety laws, and catastrophes such as the 2013 Rana Plaza collapse of a factory outside of Dhaka, Bangladesh do not seem to spark structural change. In fact, as development economist Alessandra Mezzadri shows, failures of these health, labor, and safety regulations are critical to keeping finished textiles cheap for consumers around the world. In some cases, voluntary and value-added labeling such as Fairtrade or certified organic can ensure certain safety standards for workers and farmers. However, these certifications require new relationships of trust and oversight if they are to be successful.

Learn more about mills, garment workers, and finishing textiles:

Finished cloth is then cut, stitched into clothing, and sent to retail shops around the world. The World Trade Organization estimates that global textiles and apparel exports totaled $820 billion US dollars in 2018. All of this clothing requires a vast financial infrastructure to facilitate trade between and within nations, as well as a vast physical infrastructure of shipping lanes, highways, and distribution networks that bring textiles to store shelves. As states reorganized their economies in the 1980s to drive down global prices in commodities like cotton, privately held global corporations played an increasingly important role in buying and selling textiles. Rather than assume the risks of the entire supply chain, which might run the gamut from bollworm attacks to factory strikes to sudden demand for different styles, textile and apparel corporations have focused more narrowly on buying and selling clothes on the global market.

By outsourcing clothing production, clothing companies also distance themselves from unsafe or illegal conditions in suppliers' facilities. A wave of reforms under the umbrella of corporate social responsibility increased transparency and regulation in the 1990s, but the overall structure has remained the same: farmers, brokers, ginners, millers, and shippers, and clothing sellers each assume their own risks, and the most remunerative part of this value-added supply chain ends up being the finished product. Tragedies like the Rana Plaza factory collapse or the slow violence of harassment and poor working conditions continue at garment factories around the world. Meanwhile, global demand for fast fashion has only increased. This globalized supply chain also unevenly distributes the environmental consequences of clothing trade, with lower-income countries also bearing a heavier burden of polluted water, carbon dioxide emissions, public health, and land degradation.

Once they arrive at stores, retail workers, a predominately female, insecure, non-unionized sector of the economy, sell apparel to consumers who have imagined their identity and affiliations through garments and the people who make them. With the increased prevalence of online marketing, physical stores and malls have struggled to compete for a dwindling consumer base interested in shopping in person. Clothing stores have weathered this transition better than other retailers because consumers like to check specific fits and styles, but in-person retail suffered greatly as a result of the 2020 COVID-19 pandemic.

Learn more about retail clothing and labor:

Fashion cycles are fast and speeding up. Increasing clothing consumption means that people then get rid of it by donation, resale, or in their municipal waste. The United States Environmental Protection Agency estimates that US Americans saw 11.2 million tons of clothing enter landfills in 2017. Second-hand clothing is a popular market across the Global North, where thredUP, a clothing resale company, estimates that retro styles and comparatively cheaper clothing will be part of a $64 billion global circular market by 2024. India, which does not import second-hand clothing, has a thriving domestic resale market where old clothing is transformed into new furnishings or exported west, as anthropologist Lucy Norris shows.

Thrift stores and trendy consignment shops appeal to fashion-minded consumers while donation-based stores like Goodwill and the Salvation Army offer high-quality used clothes at discount prices. These stores absorb some of the clothing discarded in the cycle of fast fashion, but they are highly selective. Resale shops do not stock clothes that they think will not sell because they have damage or are too unfashionable. Not all of these clothes sell, and so resale stores will pull them off racks after a few weeks or months. Ultimately, these stores can only keep a fraction of the clothes they receive. Along with charitable organizations, resalers who accept clothing donations package and sell them to recyclers and exporters.

Textile recyclers will buy torn and damaged fabrics for rag or stuffing materials, but most clothing that is not sold in local resale markets is repackaged and resold across the Global South, an export market estimated to be about $4 billion in 2018. While providing cheap clothing, these clothes also depress local clothing industries and undercut domestic entrepreneurs who cannot compete with donated clothes that are produced for next to no costs. On these grounds, various governments, from Haiti to India and South Africa, have opted to ban imports of some kinds of used clothing from some nations.

In 2016, the members of the East African Community, a regional economic bloc that included Rwanda, Kenya, Tanzania and Uganda, pledged to phase out used clothing imports within a three-year time period to promote local textile and footwear industries. Alarmed by these discussions, the industrial association representing 40,000 US used clothing packagers and shippers asked the US government to intervene on their behalf and threaten preferential trading access to those countries. Shortly thereafter, Kenya withdrew its commitment to the policy. In July 2017, the US government called for an out-of-cycle review of EAC countries’ eligibility for preferential access to the US market, causing Tanzania and Uganda to withdraw as well. Only Rwanda stuck to the ban, and they did indeed lose access to the US market for their clothing exports in March 2018. Kenya has temporarily banned imports during spring 2020 because of the coronavirus.

The US sanction demonstrates the lengths to which governments in the Global North will go to protect their industries, even if it comes at the expense of the ability of governments in the Global South to promote their own. It also illustrates the power that governments of rich countries can exercise in the global economy. Almost by definition, richer countries are desirable export markets, because goods can command higher prices there. This means that losing access to their markets will always be costly for poorer countries. Because in most cases market access can be governed unilaterally, rich governments almost always have this tool at their disposal. Rwanda shows that it is possible for countries in the Global South to resist this threat, but typically only if the government can afford the political and diplomatic costs of falling out of favor with countries in the Global North. This is not a straightforward criteria to meet given long-standing inequalities of power.

As incomes rise in countries buying used clothing, consumers across Asia, sub-Saharan Africa, and Central America who previously bought cheap off-season clothes are becoming more brand and fashion-conscious. For those who are fashion conscious but lack the disposable income to purchase new brands and styles, local garment entrepreneurs will copy and innovate on fashion industry brands. Knockoff clothes allow people around the world to be part of new styles and exercise creative talent.

Learn more about second-hand markets and counterfeit clothing here:

At each step along this global commodity chain, people work to bring forth material objects as well as stories about themselves and the people they imagine to be complementary to their own roles. As a daily commodity, cotton is all around us, part of the invisible infrastructure of how we live and present ourselves to the world. In every stage from seed to recycled shirt, some people find ways to benefit and live the kinds of lives they wish to live, while others find themselves exploited by local systems of power and authority. There is precarity at each stage in this supply chain, borne disproportionately by women and historically marginalized communities. The stakes of this danger are not always equal, either - while retail workers struggle to get by, farmers and garment workers are exposed to pesticides and dangerous working conditions as a daily fact of their labor.

The story of cotton stresses the danger of seeking technological fixes for problems rooted in complex agricultural, political, social, and historical issues. In part, this is because the practice of sustainable agriculture on the farm, let alone the global challenge of feeding or clothing the world, is a social, and not technological, question. India’s cotton sector has become increasingly capitalized over the past twenty years, first through pesticides and hybrid seeds, and now through herbicides and GM seeds. This drives positives, like increases in urban industrial production, export, and gross domestic product, as well as negatives, like rural inequality, the dissolution of rural safety nets through neoliberal policies, and farmer suicides. Genetically modified Bt cotton was not a cause but rather one among many contributing factors to this balance.

This complexity can be a frustrating conclusion for people who want to work toward solutions to difficult global problems. I hope that readers consider how unintended consequences are drawn out by the sociopolitical forces and historical conditions under which people live. Maps like this argue for a more anthropological engagement with communities in need, one that privileges an understanding of root, social causes by understanding how we live in a connected world. It all begins with a seed.

Check out other studies of the cotton supply chain below: