Until the early 90s, after a long drive, your windscreen looked like this:

Today, you can make the same journey: there probably won’t be a single insect on it.

Upside: your windscreen is clean.
Downside: we’re all going to die.

The insectocalypse

Organic food has had a place on our plates for a decade or so now. When it comes to food, admittedly, organic farming has a weighty argument on its side: it doesn’t increase your risk of cancer.

But when it comes to clothes, whether the cotton in your t-shirt is organic or doused by Monsanto makes no difference to your health: the toxic substances found in clothing come from dyes and other industrial treatments, not from growing the cotton¹.

That probably explains why organic cotton never took off the way organic food did: it accounts for just 0.95% of world production (versus more than 6% for food). So the overwhelming majority of cotton comes from so-called “conventional” farming. Meaning: the kind that piles on chemical fertilisers, irrigation and monoculture with no restraint whatsoever. And pesticides, too.

The thing is, cotton is essentially a “self-pollinating” plant: it needs nobody to reproduce, not even bees. So you can kill every insect around it without doing much harm to your yields. The result: cotton takes up only 2-3% of the world’s farmland but consumes 10% of all the insecticides on the planet.

Look a little closer and you find that cotton farming relies more and more on neonicotinoids, because, according to the committee of cotton-producing and cotton-consuming countries, they are “relatively safer” pesticides.

But… are they really that harmless?

If you’re over 30, you know they’re not. Because you remember the “windscreen effect” we mentioned in the introduction. And if you don’t drive, here are a few figures. In Germany, in just 27 years, 75% of flying insects have disappeared. In the United States, two thirds of the insect populations studied have lost 45% of their numbers. And as the sweeping investigation by a journalist at Le Monde shows, neonicotinoids are the main reason they are vanishing. The phenomenon is so huge that scientists call it the “Insect Apocalypse”: these two studies suggest that in just 30 years, almost half the insects on the planet have disappeared.

Then again, who cares about insects? It’s not as if they were any use (apart from biting you right on the eyelid on summer evenings)...

Actually, insects matter enormously to our survival.

If the bees die, for instance, flowering plants will no longer be pollinated: bye-bye fruit and vegetables and, more broadly, around a third of what’s on our plates.

And if you knock out the first link in the food chain, you put the survival of every other species on the line².

And the _{two other families} of insecticides used on cotton? They’re hardly any better:

• Pyrethroids, the stuff you find in Baygon-type bug sprays. They are suspected of being endocrine disruptors.
• Organophosphates are nerve agents. Fine for the nasty moths, but also for farm workers. That’s according to the 35 studies listed in this report.

You get the picture: conventional farming has a lot to answer for, and cotton is a big part of it.

A problem with the whole agro-industrial system

In thirty years, the agrochemical industry has managed to spread the use of one product more toxic than the next. How is that possible? Because the agro-industrial system as a whole has no real safeguards. Under pressure from industry lobbying, the precautionary principle has gone straight out of the window³. France has just banned neonicotinoids (the first country to do so), but that doesn’t solve the problem:

• these products stay active in the soil for a very long time (20 years for neonicotinoids)
• an equally dangerous molecule will most likely come along to replace them. In fact, there are already other pesticides in circulation that are almost certainly just as dangerous (we simply haven’t had enough time to notice yet).

So what’s the solution?

GM cotton that resists caterpillars? Monsanto tried that with Bt cotton, which produces its own insecticide. At first it worked: pesticide use dropped quite a bit wherever it was introduced. Except that nature adapts: the caterpillars became resistant. A study carried out in China found that after seven years, farmers were back to the same level of pesticide use as before Bt cotton arrived.

The only sensible thing to do is switch to organic farming (what, you’d guessed already?).

Why organic is a good thing

Organic cotton farming uses far fewer insecticides than “conventional” farming. To deal with pests, it keeps a balance between insects and their natural predators _{thanks to rich, living soil}, and it plants trap crops⁴ around the edges of the fields it wants to protect…

And organic farming has plenty of other benefits:

• It sharply reduces the use of chemical fertilisers (or does away with them altogether, in the case of agroecological farmers) through crop rotation, intercropping, minimal tillage, green manure, composting...
• It uses less water, contrary to popular belief⁵.
• It uses no synthetic herbicides (so no glyphosate, obviously). To strip the leaves before harvest, for example, farmers prefer to wait for them to fall naturally with the first frosts.
• It makes farmers less dependent on the agrochemical multinationals (to give you an idea, some small cotton farmers currently spend 60% of their income on pesticides)
• Living soil that is ploughed less captures CO2 from the atmosphere. This is called regenerative agriculture, and it could absorb up to 13% of our annual CO2 emissions

So why aren’t all brands going organic?

Some brands have used organic cotton from day one (Ekyog, Hopaal, 1083, Patine, Armed Angels, People Tree, Patagonia, Organic Basics, Knowledge Cotton Apparel...) and we take our hats off to them. But the vast majority of clothes (including some of ours) are still made from conventional cotton. Why?

First bad argument: price

Yes, organic costs more than non-organic. Farming in a way that respects the soil is harder than drenching a field in pesticides. And then there is the very tricky period farmers go through when they move from one system to the other: it can take several years, during which they can’t sell under the organic label.

But in the total price of a garment, frankly, it doesn’t change much. In a 100% cotton shirt, the cotton costs about €1.50. So even if you pay twice as much for organic cotton, it will cost you _{€1.50 more}. To give you an idea, for one of our shirts that we switched to organic cotton, our production cost went from €22 to €24.

Perfectly acceptable, no? What may be holding fast fashion brands back from organic cotton today is that their labour is so cheap that a rise in the price of cotton translates, in percentage terms, into a big jump in production cost.

Second bad argument: quality

Whether cotton is organic or not has no impact on its quality: that depends mainly on the seeds and the climate.

That said, we have been searching for over a year now, and we’ve found it very hard to find yarns that are organic AND hard-wearing… The reason is simple: demand is so low that quality organic cotton (known as “long-staple” and “extra-long-staple”) makes up _{less than 0.01% of world production}.

But growers of quality organic cotton do exist. And the more brands turn to organic cotton, the more the supply will grow, quality organic cotton included.

Third bad argument: organic cotton is no better than traditional cotton

There may well be controversy in organic food farming, particularly over the use of Bordeaux mixture (a copper-based fungicide), or the fact that sprayed fields contaminate organic ones anyway. But in textiles, there are two labels that guarantee cotton is organic and that, as far as we know, have never been called into question (unlike the “Better Cotton Initiative” and other green labels):

• OCS (Organic Content Standard)
• GOTS (Global Organic Textile Standard), which also guarantees decent working conditions

The real reason: nobody knows enough about it

The real reason brands aren’t going organic is that very few people realise how serious the problems caused by conventional cotton are.

Why don’t we know? Because the pesticide manufacturers (Bayer, Syngenta, BASF…) throw up a smokescreen⁶ to make us believe that insects aren’t disappearing because of insecticides but for a whole host of other reasons: climate change, parasites, urbanisation, light pollution at night... All of it backed by lobbying and scientific studies funded to sow doubt (this one, for example, paid for by Bayer and Syngenta, tries to show that neonicotinoids on cotton are perfectly harmless). None of these theories, of course, can explain the sudden crash in insect populations in the mid-90s, just when neonics were introduced, but never mind.

In short, as Stéphane Foucart puts it in his book Et le monde devint silencieux (“And the world fell silent”):

“The agrochemical industry has pulled off a remarkable feat: making us forget that insecticides do exactly what they were designed to do, namely destroy insects.”

Conclusion

We’ll be honest with you: less than two years ago, we had no intention of switching to organic cotton. We thought it meant paying more for not much. We naively assumed that there were laws to protect us, and that manufacturers couldn’t just do whatever they liked. We thought global warming was such a serious problem that it outweighed all the others. Then we dug into the subject and realised we’d got it wrong.

For almost a year now, we have been working to move our entire range over to organic materials. Some products on our site already are, like most of our shirts and our sweaters. For the rest, it’s under way, but as we said above, finding the right materials is no picnic. Two or three times we thought we’d cracked it, only to go back to square one after running durability tests on the finished products. But by the end of 2020, we should manage to have our whole range in organic.

Actually, we shouldn’t say we’re switching to organic, but going back to it. Closing a chapter that should never have been opened.

Written by Guillaume Declair

Update, October 2021

We read an excellent report by the Transformers Foundation that debunks a number of myths about the cotton industry. After reading it, we corrected several points in this article:

• We said that cotton uses 16% of the world’s insecticides: that was an outdated figure from 2014. In 2019, according to the International Cotton Advisory Committee (ICAC), cotton accounted for 10.24% of insecticide sales worldwide.
• We said that organic cotton represents 0.5% of the world’s cotton. For 2019/2020 (source: Textile Exchange), that has risen to 0.95%.
• While we’re at it, the report contains several very interesting debunks, including the oft-repeated claim that “the textile industry is responsible for 20% of global water pollution”. In all likelihood, the figure comes from a 2007 report by the World Bank and China, which stated that “industry” was behind 20% of the pollution in 7 Chinese rivers (textiles being one of the 6 industries mentioned). In short, nothing to do with it.

Oh, and today, we only use organic cotton in our clothes.

Notes

¹ Pesticides stay on the outer husk of the cotton. And once the cotton boll is harvested, the fibre is washed so thoroughly that no pesticide is found in the finished products. According to Antoine Guian, director of the SMT textile testing laboratory.

² Plenty of insects provide invisible services that agriculture needs just as much: ladybirds eat aphids, earthworms aerate and feed the soil... And insects get eaten by birds, which in turn get eaten by other animals, and so on.

³ One example: under pressure from industry lobbying, the Scopaff (the EU committee that decides how European farming laws are applied) has refused 27 times (!) to rule on a new pesticide approval process that takes chronic toxicity to bees into account (according to Stéphane Foucart in “Et le monde devint silencieux”).

⁴ Trap crops are crops planted to lure pests elsewhere: alfalfa for true bugs, for example, or chickpeas for certain caterpillars.

⁵ Granted, the critics of organic cotton are right to say that GM cotton plants yield more than non-GM plants (organic ones included), so they need less irrigation water per unit produced. But you also have to count “grey” water, in other words the water polluted by pesticides, which according to the NGO Water Footprint is five times lower in volume than in conventional farming.

⁶ It looks strangely like the tobacco industry’s strategy in the 1950s. When the first studies linking tobacco and cancer came out, the cigarette makers didn’t dispute them. They preferred to fund a huge number of other studies (more than 6,000) showing that cancer could have other causes (heredity, nutrition, etc.), to make us believe that smoking wasn’t such a big deal compared with all the rest.

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Who are we to say this?

You’re reading La Mode à l’Envers, a blog run by the clothing brand Loom. The textile industry is in a sorry state, and the planet is footing the bill. So whatever we manage to understand about this industry, we try to explain here. Because making clothes that last is good, but revealing, sharing and inspiring is even more powerful.

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Illustration credit: Olivier Balez