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By Root 1034 0

using up tons of water outside their borders. For example, about half of the 176 cubic yards (135 cubic meters) of water used per year for cotton consumption per person in the United States come from outside the United States.7 In Europe, a full 84 percent of the cotton-related water footprint comes from elsewhere in the world,8 which means U.S. and European consumers are essentially soaking up the water of cotton-producing countries elsewhere, decreasing the water available to people in those places, and leaving them to figure out how to handle the resulting water scarcity problems. (Note that the water footprints refer to water use not just in growing but also processing cotton, as well as the water pollution caused by both.) With global water scarcity increasing and impacting public health in a huge way, this scenario is downright unfair and is reason enough to pause before adding yet another cotton t-shirt to our already full drawers.

One of the most tragic examples of water depletion is the former Soviet state of Uzbekistan, where state-run cotton farms drained the rivers that flowed into the Aral Sea, the world’s fourth-largest inland sea, reducing its volume of water by 80 percent between 1960 and 2000 and creating a near desert out of the once green and fertile area.9 The shrinking of the Aral Sea has literally changed the climate of the area, causing shorter, hotter summers and colder winters, less rainfall, and tremendous dust storms. The dust carries salt and pesticides including DDT, which are resulting in a host of public health crises. Growing cotton is not just depleting the quantity of water, it’s also damaging the quality of water that remains; there’s less water overall and what remains is increasingly polluted by agricultural chemicals.10 And we’re talking about a ton of chemicals.

Though it takes up just 2.5 percent of the world’s croplands, cotton uses 10 percent of the world’s fertilizers and 25 percent of its insecticides11; agribusiness spends nearly $2.6 billion worth of pesticides on cotton plants every year.12 Farmers in the United States apply nearly one-third of a pound of chemical fertilizers and pesticides for every pound of cotton harvested.13 Many of the pesticides (which include insecticides, herbicides, and fungicides like aldicarb, phorate, methamidophos, and endosulfan) are among the most hazardous chemicals and carcinogens in existence and were originally developed by scientists for simultaneous use as nerve agents in warfare alongside their use as insecticides.14

In conventional cotton farming, chemicals are first sprayed on the fields before planting to fumigate the soil. The cotton seeds themselves are often dipped in fungicide. Then the plants are sprayed with pesticides several times over the course of the growing season.15

These chemicals are indiscriminate: they kill beneficial insects and microorganisms in the soil in addition to bugs that eat the cotton plants. Snuffing out the good bugs means eliminating the natural predators of bad bugs, which creates the need for yet more pesticides. Meanwhile more than 500 species of insects, 180 weeds, and 150 fungi have developed resistance to pesticides.16 All of this keeps chemical companies busy developing more, while farmers get stuck on “pesticide treadmills.” Further compounding the problem, industrial agriculture has whittled hundreds of diverse species of cotton down to just a handful of varieties; the common practice known as monocropping (planting farms with just one variety) makes farms even more vulnerable to pests, which love to feed on big fields of one consistent meal.

Even when used according to instructions, pesticides drift into neighboring communities, contaminate groundwater and surface water as well as animals like fish, birds, and humans—and, above all, the farmworkers. Cotton workers frequently suffer from neurological and vision disorders. In one study of pesticide illnesses in my state, California, cotton ranked third for total number of pesticide-caused worker illnesses.17

In many developing countries where