What’s In Your Pants?

Bad pants are everywhere. It’s not just that they are often made in sweatshops, poison the land, rob it of water and are dyed with chemicals that can give you cancer, they often also fund terrible regimes that would make you ashamed to know that, inadvertently, you’re supporting the exploitation of people just like you, the destruction of the environment and businesses that rob from the poor and to feed the uber rich.

Key ingredients of bad pants:

1. Made using pesticides.

Today cotton farmers spend around $2billion per year on pesticides (approximately the sale of global revenue of Fairtrade products). In rich countries like America, crops are sprayed with really sophisticated machinery which protect people from these poisons (just one drop of which on your skin can kill). However, in many other countries there is no such protection with the result that approximately 1 million farmers are hospitalized each year with severe illnesses due to pesticide use. Bad pants are grown with pesticides that:

• Poison the land so that it cannot be used for cultivating food
• Poison the farmers and their families if they cannot afford protective clothing.
• Poison the food chain - getting in to rivers through run off, into cattle through the cotton seeds used for feed, and people through cotton seed cooking oil.
• Are very expensive, adding to the costs of production for the farmer and the profits for multinationals.

2. Use too much water:

Water resources are under more pressure today than at any other time in human history causing massive and often irreparable environmental damage. As many developing countries privatise their water industries and divert its use for agriculture, conflicts fuelled by water shortage are becoming more and more common. Cotton is a very thirsty crop and 75% of the world’s cotton is farmed through flooding of field meaning that it can take up to 20,000 litres of water to make just one kilo of cotton! Bad Pants cause water problems because:

• Water is diverted from food production and drinking water to inefficient cotton farming.
• Water is contaminated by pesticides and unusable for human consumption.
• Natural resources are over used causing the destruction of the environment - eg. The Aral Sea, once the size of the North Sea is now just 15% its size.

3. Unfair Trade:

Despite the fact that the consumption of cotton has more than doubled since 1980, the price of cotton is at its lowest point for over 20 years. The way that trade is controlled by rich people and politicians means the rich get richer and poor get poorer. This means that bad pants:

• Don’t pay farmers a fair rate for their cotton and, as happens far too often, are forced to sell their crop for less than it cost to grow it.
• Are made in factories where workers aren’t paid a fair wage, have no rights and child labour is exploited.

OK so, where’s the proof you say! Bad pants cant be that bad can they? Well, yes they can. Below we’re pointing out one of the worst cases, but there are stacks of other examples. You might have seen them talking about this one on Newsnight and it highlights the evils of bad pants perfectly.

Uzbekistan: the state of bad pants.

Uzbekistan exports 800,000 tonnes of cotton a - the world’s second largest amount - generating c$1 billion per year. According to the Environmental Justice Foundation and a recent report on the BBC’s Newsnight, the majority of clothes on the high street in the UK are made from blends comprising Uzbek cotton. Most of us don’t even realise that our bad pants are colluding with Uzbek bandits to:

• Close rural schools and force the school kids and teachers to work in the fields for 12 hours a day, 7 days a week for 3 months straight during the cotton picking season.
• Pay cotton farmers just $2 per month, force them to use the highly toxic pesticides with no protective clothing whilst embezzling all the profits themselves.
• Force people living in cotton growing areas to stay in their village’s boundaries and violently persecute them if they leave or communicate with the outside world.
• Drain the Aral sea to 15% of its original size causing environmental chaos in the region.
• To fund thugs to persecute, abuse and brutally murder the Uzbek people so that we can have cheap, dirty and bad pants!

Bad pants support abuses like this. Bad things like this need to be replaced with good thing. We could go on but am sure you get the gist and we’ll be developing much more work like this with our partners! It doesn’t have to be like and so this is just one example of why we need to rid the world of bad pants!

I’m sure you agree we shouldn’t even be associated with these bad pants, we don’t have to! The problem is, most brands refuse to say where the cotton in their pants are from. They might say where it’s made, but not where they’re from which means they’re likely t be from Uzbekistan. This means they’re bad pants. If you want to do something about it, we recommend you stick to good pants, however, the choice is yours. At least now you have one!

Good Pants:

If you’ve just read about the bad pants,hopefully you’ll agree that bad pants aren’t something that you want to be associated with, and that we should rod the world of them. The problem is though, we all need pants, and so how can we tell if they’re good pants!?! Lots of people would get upset if we just started waking around without pants on! Well our pants are guaranteed to be good pants and that’s a promise. We work really closely with the factories and farming communities who grow, sew and stitch out pants. In March we’re off to India where we’re starting to work even more closely with them to increase the impact of our good pants even more!!

Here’s what makes our pants so damn good:

Our pants are beautiful right from Grain to groin! The most important thing about our good pants is that they support amazing people and organizations in India to build their own answers to problems completely fairly with a positive impact on the environment! The more good pants we sell, the more good things we support and the more bad things we replace! Key ingredients of our good pants are that they’re:

1. Completely organic!

Yes! Organic isn’t just great with food, it’s also great for your pants! If you’re going to cover your bits nicely we think they shouldn’t be covered in chemicals! However, let’s put that thought aside for a minute and realise that no bad chemicals in our good pants mean that:

• The farmers make their own natural pesticides and fertilizers. This means they don’t poison themselves, the land and their food chain and are not pushed into debt by the big chemical companies.
• The farmers can rotate crops so they can grow food for their families and to sell to make money!
• They are not genetically modified in any way.

2. Use water wisely!

In the UK we just turn on the tapand water comes out but as we all know, this isn’t the same for most people in the world! However, the clever farming techniques used by the farmers who grow our good pants mean that:

• Up to 80% less water is used to grow the cotton thanks to special drip feeding systems.
• Wells and boreholes are dug to ensure farmers effectively can use and store water.
• No rivers are polluted so they can be used for drinking and fishing.

3. Fairtrade:

90% of people in Britain know about fairtrade now but we’re sure that they don’t know about what this really means for the farmers that grow the pants. The farmers are taking an amazing approach to tackling the challenges they face and through fairtrade,our good pants support them by:

• Paying them a fair price for theircotton which is normally just under 15% better than the unfair market rate.
• Guaranteeing farmers access to markets so they can sell their cotton.
• Taking out the middle men so that farmers don’t get cheated.
• Paying local communities who decide which projects to run - so far these have focused on health, water and education to name just a few.
• Working with amazing Indian organizations like our partners Agrocel who employ local farming experts to support, train and recruit farmers so they can be as effective as possible.

4. Ethical factories

If our pants were made in a sweatshop, or a factory that polluted the environment then we could hardly call them good pants! Fortunately, we work with 2 amazing factories that can make the highest quality pants available to the highest possible level of ethics. It’s really important that we build log term respectful relationships with our suppliers so that they can keep their top standards going! Our good factories mean that our good pants guarantee:

• No child labour is used at any point in their production.
• All workers are paid fair wages and work fair hours
• There is no chemical pollution emitted into the environment.
• All of the dyes used are special healthy dyes (called non-azo dyes) that mean they wont give us cancer.

5. Low carbon footprint:

We all know the world’s getting hotter and we’ve got to do something about it and fast. Yes, we have to make them in a factory and yes they come from the other side of the world, but cotton doesn’t grow here and the way they’re made means that we can be sure that they have the lightest footprint possible! You’ll be glad to hear that our good pants are being part of the solution by:

• Consuming approximately 1kg of CO2 while they were growing!
• Keeping the farm and factory as close together as possible to minimise the amount of transport necessary.
• Only being transported by land and sea and not the air.
• Continually innovating to find new, sustainable and real ways to benefit the environment.

OK again, so where’s the human side? Well try this for size:

Khima’s story

KhimaRanchhod lives on his four-acre farm with his wife Jamnaben, son Sujubhai and daughters Jomiben, Gitaben and Nariben. Khima has farmed cotton all his life, like his father before him. He also grows millet to make flour for the family’s chapatis, with any excess being sold to the local market along with the beans he grows and harvests in the summer.

Growing cotton is hard work. Khima digs channels each year to irrigate his two acres of cotton to ensure a good crop, but the falling water table means this can only be done twice a year. With the help of his neighbours he gathers his harvest over an eight-day period, starting at 6am and finishing at 4pm and breaking only for lunch. Khima used to sell his seed cotton to local traders and often received a poor price. “We would deliver the cotton by bullock cart but the trader would always find a reason to give us a bad price.”

He now sells his entire crop to one of our partners in India, Agrocel, for a higher, stable price and, with the help of their field officers, has converted the farm to organic production. Khima and his wife have struggled to keep their son in school but their daughters weren’t so lucky. The village school only takes students up to age 14 and they couldn’t afford the only option of sending the girls to a boarding school.

Khima sees a brighter future now that Agrocel is supplying his cotton to the UK Fairtrade market. “We will benefit economically, but more than this we will be able to improve the education of the children in the village.” And Khima is looking forward to replacing the thatched roof on their mud-walled house with tiles: “A higher income means we will be able to increase production by buying more organic manure to improve the soil -then we will be able to make improvements to our house.”