With growing pressure on the apparel industry to prove its sustainability efforts, the Better Cotton Initiative (BCI) is getting ready to publish its first impact report in five years. At the Fall Sourcing Journal Summit, Jasmin Malik Chua, climate and labor editor at Sourcing Journal, took the stage with Aliya Malik, chief commercial officer at the BCI, who shared updates on the group’s changing strategy, new data and plans to move toward fully regenerative farming.
Malik said the five-year gap in public impact reports happened because there was so much global farm data that it was hard to standardize. The new report, which will come out on World Cotton Day, aims to highlight how cotton farming differs from region to region.
“We have a lot of data, and that has led us, in the last five years, to be almost green-hushing,” Malik said. “There was so much data—it wasn’t that comparable. How do you put it out? How do you share it meaningfully? What if it doesn’t all look great? We ended up deciding that we wanted to put it all out there to create more transparency in the industry about how cotton looks different all around the world.”
Malik said the report shows clear environmental improvements, but also ongoing challenges in different regions. The data showed that nearly 70 percent of BCI-licensed farmers improved soil health by up to 30 percent on average. However, results for crop protection and pesticide use were mixed. Malik said smaller farms who got direct BCI support and training made big reductions, but larger farms in the U.S., Brazil and Australia saw less change, which balanced out the global results.
Malik said as climate conditions become more unpredictable, farmers have to adapt. She said that climate is now the main factor shaping what happens on the ground.
“For the farmers, and we really focus on the farm, there’s no denying climate change,” Malik said. “The climate is the farmer’s boss. And you are a taker of what is happening in the climate, whether there’s water, there’s not water, whether it’s too hot, or whether it’s too wet. So that it is challenging, and it means a lot of adaptation is needed.”
Malik said the BCI shifted from sustainable training to a formal regenerative standard. She said while regenerative practices have long been part of traditional farming, today’s market expects higher standards and stricter traceability.
“Regenerative practices at the farm level are not new to farmers,” Malik said. “It was the way you farmed before. With the ‘green revolution,’ we were trying to produce as much as possible but not viewing the soil as a commodity that can be drawn down on. When that happens, the food stops having nutrition in it, and the land pays the cost.”
To help with this change, BCI is expanding its Monitoring, Reporting, and Verification (MRV) system by combining field data with new technology like satellite monitoring and real-time AI checks. Malik also said that technology alone is not enough. She encouraged retail brands to make long-term financial commitments, instead of seeing regenerative cotton as just another compliance requirement.
“MRV, or monitoring, reporting, and verification, it’s technical, but it’s also pretty simple,” Malik said. “It’s about having reporting systems where there are also checks so that the data is meaningful and reliable… We’re making some big investments into how we do that at the system level. So it means working with stuff that’s out there, like satellites that can see farms, using that as checks, and working with AI to make sure that data’s being validated on a real-time basis.”
To wrap up, Malik urged the fashion industry to use financial models like the fair-trade premiums found in food agriculture. She argued that real sustainability is not possible without direct investment in the communities that grow cotton.
“Cotton is the foundation for the lives and livelihoods of 250 million people around the world—cotton is people,” Malik stated. “In food-based crops, that’s understood. Price premiums and fair trade models for cocoa and coffee are well understood, accepted, and invested in. And in textiles, we don’t do that, because we’re always tempted to look for a quick win and a quick shortcut for sustainability.”
