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South Aral Sea shrinking
The Aral Sea in 2000 on the left and 2014 on the right. Photograph: Atlas Photo Archive/NASA
The Aral Sea in 2000 on the left and 2014 on the right. Photograph: Atlas Photo Archive/NASA

Cotton production linked to images of the dried up Aral Sea basin

This article is more than 9 years old

The fashion industry is linked to the environmental devastation in the Central Asian inland sea – once the world’s fourth largest lake, the Aral sea ‘completely dried’ in August

What do the catwalks of Paris have to do with 25,000 miles of exposed sea bed thousands of miles to the east? While all eyes have been fixed on designer collections and members of the front row, the true cost of the fashion industry has been revealed in a shock announcement by NASA that the Aral Sea in Central Asia has now completely dried up.

The Aral Sea was once the world’s fourth largest lake, home to 24 species of fish and surrounded by fishing communities, lush forests and wetlands. While the lake was salt water, the rivers that fed it were fresh water. In the 1950’s the Soviet Union began using the rivers to irrigate the surrounding agricultural area, a process that has been continued to this day by Uzbekistan’s brutal dictator Islam Karimov.

The exposure of the bottom of the lake has released salts and pesticides into the atmosphere poisoning both farm land and people alike. Carcinogenic dust is blown into villages causing throat cancers and respiratory diseases.

The fashion industry is linked to this horror of dictatorships and environmental devastation by the fact that the crop being grown with the river water is cotton – 1.47m hectares of cotton. A hugely water intensive crop, one shirt can use up to 2,700 litres.

“Conventional cotton (as opposed to organic cotton) has got to be one of the most unsustainable fibres in the world,” says fashion designer and environmentalist Katharine Hamnett. “Conventional cotton uses a huge amount of water and also huge amounts of pesticides which cause 350,000 farmer deaths a year and a million hospitalisations.”

Reflecting on the loss of the Aral Sea, Hamnett states: “This is not just climate change this is an extinction issue. As Vandana Shiva said ‘no species has deliberately designed its own extinction’, but with industrial agriculture we have. The fashion industry is one of the most polluting industries in the world, causing human misery, enormous cost of life and gigantic environmental devastation.”

The harvest of Uzbek cotton is taking place right now – it started on the 5 September and is expected to last until the end of October. The harvest itself is also a horror story, on top of the environmental devastation, this is cotton picked using forced labour. Every year hundreds of thousands of people are systematically sent to work in the fields by the government.

Under pressure from campaigners, in 2012, Uzbek authorities banned the use of child labour in the cotton harvest, but it is a ban that is routinely flouted. In 2013 there were 11 deaths during the harvest (pdf), including a six year old child, Amirbek Rakhmatov, who accompanied his mother to the fields and suffocated after falling asleep on a cotton truck.

Campaigners have also managed to get 153 fashion brands to sign a pledge to never knowingly use Uzbek cotton. Anti-Slavery International have worked on this fashion campaign but acknowledge that despite successes there is still a long way to go.

“Not knowingly using Uzbek cotton and actually ensuring that you don’t use Uzbek cotton are two completely different things,” explains Jakub Sobik, press officer at Anti-Slavery International.

One major problem that Sobik points out is that much of the Uzbek cotton crop now ends up in Bangladesh and China - key suppliers for European brands. “Whilst it is very hard to trace the cotton back to where it comes from because the supply chain is so subcontracted and deregulated, brands have a responsibility to ensure that slave picked cotton is not polluting their own supply chain.”

The two issues – of environmental destruction and forced labour – are intrinsically linked. “Changing the policy that puts farmers and citizens in the position of forced labour to harvest cotton is the essential first step to addressing the overall picture,” states Matt Fischer-Daly from the Cotton Campaign, an international coalition working to end Uzbek slavery. “Farmers free to diversify their crops and escape local government controlled monopolies are the lynch pin to changing the ecological impacts.”

With cotton one of Uzbekistan’s largest cash crops (pdf) accounting for 11.3% of the country’s export earning in 2010-2011 and with little criticism of President Karimov’s human rights record by his allies in the US and UK, there are serious hurdles to overcome. Hurdles that could be lessened if fashion conglomerates demanded higher standards.

This could be done by brands implementing legally binding contracts with suppliers that ensure suppliers and sub-suppliers do not ever purchase Uzbek cotton. The contracts could be verified using traceability systems and social audits, a process that requires time and money but which is fully achievable. Hamnett advises another key step - phasing out conventional cotton and investing instead in its far more sustainable counterpart: organic cotton.

The environmental impact of losing the Aral Sea is not yet known, what we do know is that the cotton that destroyed it, is cotton picked by forced labour and destined for European shops. This is the reality of a subcontracted deregulated industry not bound by any global environmental or minimum wage legislation.

There was nothing accidental about what is happening in Central Asia, a catastrophe that has provided irrefutable evidence of the damage being done to our planet by the fashion industry. We can either focus on Paris Fashion Week or we can act now to save our world. But to ignore the industry’s role in the loss of the Aral Sea is to ignore the destruction of our planet.

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