Scandal at the Cotton Club
Disaster hits Better Cotton, but we can do so much better. Here are the farmers ploughing an alternative furrow - and the brand enabling them to do so.
Hello, good to be back, and thank you for your patience while I had a couple of weeks off. I spent one of those in Brazil, and honestly, I’m so happy to be writing about what I found for you, here. What a privilege it was to meet the people you’re about to read about, and to see how things can be done. It’s Not Sustainable is about the good stuff - and this story is absolutely it.
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At first glance there may not be much the Princess of Wales and the Brazilian farmer Valquíria Viana dos Santos have in common, but both like the same sneakers. For Kate, they are an inevitable part of her mum on the run uniform, for Valquíria, they are a cash crop allowing her to remain on the land her ancestors were brought to as slaves. Not only that, they are the key to expanding her family agro-ecology business and generating an income that allows her to raise her sons as a single mother.
"I learned farming from my father and mother - I used to sit under a tree to cook beans for them,” Valquíria told me in her small, Barbie pink house in the northern state of Brazil’s Piauí last month. She is immaculately turned out, (how she manages to farm in 36C heat without her make up running is a source of miracles), warmly welcoming and an expert cake maker. “My dream is to have my cotton crop much bigger - to have commerce for all our people, then life conditions would improve greatly,” she says. Valquíria tends a hectare of land near her home, rears several livestock, raises two sons and manages a baking business. The farm used to generate food for her and her community, but when she joined the local APASPI co-operative, a collective of about 100 or so local family farmers that pool their crops for sale, she was able to obtain organic certification and the idea to grow cotton for cash became a form of revenue. Now she grows cotton alongside corn, peppers, watermelon, beans and pumpkin. She wants to expand her cotton business, and the sneaker brand she is selling to want as much of her crop as possible.
Last week Brazil’s cotton industry hit the headlines. Vogue Business and BoF both ran stories on how the certification body Better Cotton had been caught with its pants down. According to the NGO Earthsight, Better Cotton is sourcing from Brazilian agrobusiness linked to deforestation and human rights abuses. When you are buying a t-shirt and you flip the label to see a ‘Better Cotton” certification, you think you are doing the right thing. Zara and H&M source much of their cotton through this initiative - and label it so. Earthsight’s revelations precipitated stinging letters from these brands: the only transparency they can have on their complex and varied supply chains is through third party bodies like Better Cotton. Better Cotton’s reputation now stands in tatters.
Sebastien Kopp and Francois Morillion have seen all of this. When they were looking for a way out of banking, they knew only one thing - banking was boring. Friends from school, (and unlikely friends - Sebastien is serious and precise, Francois jovial and warm), they thought there must be a better, more interesting way to do business and enjoy life. Money, they agreed, wasn’t the end - it was just the means. So they set off on a year long expedition to study business models for sustainable living. They toured the world looking for inspiration, concluding that a Brazilian fairtrade coffee model seemed the closest to ‘good business’ - giving small farmers a direct and well paid route to market. Now they just needed their own crop, and then a product. They swapped coffee for cotton and rubber, and as they were both obsessed with sneakers, designed a canvas shoe. The brand was named Veja (meaning ‘look’) and they set about designing the perfect supply chain model.
It is Francois who brought me to Valquíria’s house, and the easy way he chats with her mother, cuddles her cat and jokes about his love of cakes makes you understand how this supply chain relationship works. He, and his on-the-ground team, visit these farmers all the time. They know them all, personally, their families, their fields. Seventeen years later, Veja sells 4 million pairs of shoes a year, using natural rubber sourced from the Amazon, recycled plastic from rubbish collectors in Rio and as much of its cotton as it can from co-operatives like Valquíria’s. Francois is big with the hugs, quick with the jokes, adores everyone he meets and listens - really listens - when they talk. “We can learn so much from these people,” he remarks following a long and involved conversation about the biduca pest, the blight of the cotton plant. (These farmers pick the biduca off by hand, but by planting rows of cotton alternately with corn, they stop the pest spreading). His farmers are paid three times the market price for their cotton, and the rubber farmers five times, to match the offers they are getting from loggers to take the forest off their hands - “rough justice” pricing, as he calls it. They make a 10-15% profit margin on each shoe because everything goes back into their supply chain. Nike is probably making an 80% margin, ploughing their profit into sports stars and ad campaigns. Ever tempted to do some of the same, I ask him? He looks at me as if I’m mad: “Where would be the fun in that?” he says, before tucking into a farm breakfast and horsing around with his local supply team.
Valquíria currently farms about a hectare of her parents’ land, but there are several more (not currently farmed) her parents could hand over. They worry about her work load, (Valquíria’s partner moved to Sao Paulo to find work in construction, coming home infrequently). The land was bequeathed to the family as part of a quilambo settlement by the Brazilian government: Valquíria’s great, great, great grandparents were imported to Brazil from Africa as slaves. As much as 70% of the Brazilian population directly descends from enslaved Africans. It’s not widely known, but Brazil imported ten times as many slaves as the whole of North America, shipped in to serve Portuguese land owners, farm sugar and mine gold. Brazil’s President Lula saw the settlements as a way of bringing economic stability to the poverty-ravaged north east of Brazil, where the Amazon dominates and much of the land is unclaimed.
In Brazil, cotton farming is the best and worst of worlds: 99% is big agrobusiness open to exploitation, and 1% organic, subsistence, family farms, organised into co-operatives, growing small amounts of cotton and honey for cash. This is Brazil's agro-ecology movement and it is gold standard for environment, labour and quality, as well as direct traceability. This is Valequeria’s industry, it is also that of 27 year old Luan Dos Reis, who unlike much of his generation does not want to decamp to the big city, but stay on his family’s land and make his 7 hectares pay. All of his cotton, (grown alongside several other crops for soil health and pest protection), is bought by Veja, who guarantee a 50% cash payment upfront, and pay bonuses when the land is well stewarded and documented. Luan is supported by his young wife who is training in agriculture technology and wants to be a teacher; the two are the bright hope for the future of agriculture in Brazil. Managing the water supply is done by maintaining soil health, (there is no added irrigation), diverse planting systems and sharing knowledge. It’s the dream of any sustainability preacher and proof that ‘the old ways’ have a future once Big Farming has depleted its soil out of existence.
Veja has become the primary supporter of thousands of small family cotton farmers in the north of Brazil. Kopp and Morillion have known many of their suppliers for years and are offering them growth and a safe path forward. As Valquíria says, “Few women want to work in the field, as it’s hard. But if you focus, you get the reward. Everything we want in life requires determination to make it happen." Kopp and Morillion have grown their business slowly, and very carefully. “The fun of it also grows,” says Francois. “The business is like a living thing, like a tree that grows a new branch every year, not going high and sometimes losing a bit of self too. Seventeen years is nothing - it takes two to three hundred years in a forestry cycle to get the really big trees.”
What brands like Veja do, is allow consumers to make good choices. You can’t make good choices at brands that don’t - or can’t - put the work into their supply chains.
For transparency, Veja paid for my trip to Brazil. I spoke to the farmers directly, and those running the co-operatives, local politicians and agro-technicians. These farmers experience dryer, longer winters now and variable weather patterns. They are at the sharp end of climate change - which they all noted without question - and the irony is these people are the ones who are most mindful about how they live within their resource and work their land responsibly.
For me it was the most pure of stories: by simply ‘looking’ at where everything has come from, how it is made (Veja have worked with the same Brazilian factories since they started), what happens after it is sold, (their new stores all offer mending services), and how they can benefit society in as broad a way as possible, (their logistics operations are staffed by disabled and marginalised people), they have the purest form of good business. I’m sure there are niggles, and not everything runs smoothly - but what is obvious is their intention. Which begins at the very beginning - the seed of the cotton plant, and continues right through to past the point of sale with their care, repair and upcycling programmes. If you wear Veja, you’re voting for this. I’m sure this wasn’t lost on the Princess of Wales.
You can read more about what Veja are up to here.
Until next week,
Tiff.
Such a joy and breath of fresh air to read! Love the personal connection and talking directly to the people actually producing materials instead of more ‘buy this, buy that’ links - THANK YOU!
Love that you are getting into the field! Next time you go I’d love to hear your thoughts on the clothing bales that get dumped in these places. All the best from Belize, Ruth. PS 3 pieces into my 5 purchases for the year, what a mindset change it has been.