Are you a big stickler for organic foods? Well, you might want to think about extending your concern to organic cotton too.
Put the pesticide use, mono-cropping, and detriment to farmers aside for a moment. Why is organic cotton important?
We are what we eat. And, a main feed for cattle isn’t just corn.
The long cotton fibers from the cotton plant make up about forty percent of the harvested good. The other sixty percent left over is cotton linter (seed and short fibers), which goes to make the textile curpo, nail polish, gun powder, but it’s also fed to cattle. Remember your science class here: If we eat dairy or meat products, we are ingesting that sixty percent of cotton too.
Cotton can be a dirty industry
Cotton is responsible for sixteen percent of the global insecticide use–more than any other crop in the world! And $2billion of chemicals are sprayed on the US cotton crop alone–half of these chemicals are considered toxic by the World Health Organization.
And you don’t just need to battle with Genetically Modified Crops in your food: GM cotton (Bt) makes up half of the global cotton production.
So if we are ingesting cotton too, isn’t it important to push a little harder for organic cotton?
What to do about it?: Support organization like the Sustainable Cotton Project and Better Cotton Initiative.