Boosting sustainable cotton production in Africa
African cotton is almost exclusively grown by smallholder farmers using traditional crop rotation methods, irrigating their fields with harvested rainwater and picking cotton by hand. It accounted for 8% of world cotton in 2008-9, placing Africa outside the world’s top ten cotton producers and well behind major producers such as China (32%) and India (22%). Sustainable cotton represents just 2% of the world’s fibre, with sustainable African cotton currently comprising a tiny fraction of the total. However, a new partnership between the Better Cotton Initiative (BCI) and Cotton Made in...
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