the world of organic agriculture - Organic Eprints

7 Crop Information & Statistics
7.1 Organic Cotton
Bàrbara Baraibar 1
Cotton cultivation has a long history, but still it is not known exactly how old this crop is.
Scientists searching caves in Mexico found bits of cotton bolls and pieces of cotton cloth that
proved to be at least 7’000 years old. In Pakistan, it seems that cotton was being grown, spun and
woven into cloth 3’000 years BC, and at the same time natives of Egypt’s Nile valley were making
and wearing cotton clothing.
This crop has today become the most important fiber crop, with an estimated world production of
25 million tons of fiber (lint) in 2005/06 2 . Cotton belongs to the family of the Malvaceae (gender
Gossypium), and its more important species are Gossypium herbaceum, G. barbadense and G.
hirstium.
The three largest producers are China, the USA and India, which has the biggest area under
cotton cultivation (9 million hectares). Cotton production currently sustains the livelihood of
17 million people in India. In some African countries like Burkina Faso, Mali and Benin, cotton
is playing an even more dominant role in agricultural exports.
In cotton production worldwide, more than twenty percent of total insecticides used in agriculture
are applied, and in many areas, irrigated cotton cultivation has led to depletion of ground and
surface water resources. Moreover, farmers’ health is at stake because of these applications. Soil
fertility is declining while production costs increase and the prices go down.
In this scenario, an increasing number of farmers change to organic cultivation in order to restore
their soil fertility, reduce production costs, get a better price for their certified organic harvest
and improve their health significantly.
Although organic cotton currently occupies only a tiny niche of less than one percent of global
cotton production, its cultivation is already reported in 27 countries on five continents. 3 These
countries are:
• Africa: Benin, Burkina Faso, Egypt, Mali, Mozambique, Senegal, Tanzania, Togo,
Uganda, Zambia and Zimbabwe.
• Asia: China, India, Kyrgyzstan, Azerbaijan and Syria and Pakistan
1 Bàrbara Baraibar, in charge of conducting the 2005/2006 survey; at FiBL from October 2005 to January 2006, now
Barcelona, Spain. Contact via FiBL (info.suisse@fibl.org).
2 International Cotton Advisory Committee, World Statistics
3 Eyhorn, F, Ratter, S.G. and Ramakrishnan. 2005. Organic Cotton Crop Guide. FiBL.
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