TL;DR:
- The vast majority of cotton used by global fashion brands is sourced in East Turkistan, China's Xinjiang region, where a largely Muslim Uyghur population as the biggest minority group is subject to extreme persecution by the Chinese state, including torture, rape, forced sterilisation, and slave-like labour conditions
- Experts say the EU Forced Labour Regulation that will come into force in December 2027 is an important step, but urge for further steps, e.g., a law forcing brands to disclose their steps taken to prevent forced labour in their supply chains
- Financial issues and costs of tracking material back to their origin is no excuse, experts say
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Most customers walking into Dublin city centre clothes shops would not dream of buying products linked to forced labour practices.
And yet many of them may be doing exactly that, without realising. That was the core claim made in a recent RTÉ Investigates documentary, which reported that supplies sold to many Irish retailers could be linked to forced labour.
Many of these firms reportedly source cotton from Xinjiang, a region in northwest China where the largely Muslim Uyghur population is the biggest minority group.
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Many international retailers have pledged to stop buying cotton sourced from the region. However, RTÉ revealed that suppliers to many Irish retailers still have links to these areas.
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Rubens Carvalho, deputy director at environmental non-profit Earthsight, points out: “The average person who walks into a shop doesn’t wish to be complicit in forced labour and would probably be upset to find out they could be inadvertent accomplices.”
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Take the example of Xinjiang. If brands have said they will not buy from the area, why does cotton linked to the region still end up in shops?
A key problem ... is the certification systems used by retailers. Most of these schemes don’t give significant detail on where cotton is actually sourced from.
For example, a type of certification system used by many retailers is called “mass balance”.
Here, the certification body inspects cotton farms to ensure they operate ethically. However, it allows for the mixing of certified and non-certified cotton. So a product can be sold with ‘60 per cent certified’ cotton. This means that while 60 per cent of the cotton is from certified farms, the source of the remaining 40 per cent is unknown.
“The problem is that once you attach a sustainability label to goods, it can provide a misleading image,” says Carvalho.
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Take Better Cotton, which describes itself as the largest cotton sustainability programme in the world. The body is funded by retailers and brands.
It clearly states that cotton which is certified under the Better Cotton Initiative “is not traceable to its country of origin”.
“This doesn’t allow consumers of goods to have visibility over where their goods come from,” says Carvalho.
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“For large companies, it shouldn’t be hard or expensive to do,” he says. “You could use barcodes or QR codes in cotton bales, for example.” But Dr Len Wassenaar, a leading expert in the type of testing used by cotton retailers, says this could also cause issues. “It is easy to change a label or a barcode,” he says.
“When there are pennies on the pound to be made, there will be fraud in so many areas, not just cotton. That’s why chemical tests are so compelling.”
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Dr Wassenaar points out that the testing companies often don’t publicly share their work, meaning it can’t be verified by other scientists.
“[Chemical testing] is a powerful tool, but transparency is needed,” he says.
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Patricia Carrier, a human rights lawyer with the Coalition to End Forced Labour in the Uyghur region, says attempts to certify cotton late in the supply process create too many issues.
She says it would be better if large retailers and brands insisted on traceability from the very start of the production process.
“No certification is going to be able to guarantee a retailer that their product isn’t tainted by cotton from the region… Only a full mapping of the supply can show if a brand or retailer is linked to a region.”
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Carrier says [costs of tracing back cotton are] no excuse. She also points out that EU legislators are pushing for this reform to happen.
Last year, the EU introduced the Forced Labour Regulation.
This bans products made with forced labour from being sold in the bloc. Regulators can force retailers which break the rules to withdraw their products from the market.
The rules will only come into force in December 2027 and Carrier says there are still question marks over how enforcement will work in practice.
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“The EU Forced Labour Regulation is a great starting point.”
Carrier says retailers should start looking now to “shift their supply chains out of the Uyghur region”, so they’re not caught out once the new rules take effect.
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Nessa Cosgrove, a Labour senator, says the EU’s Forced Labour Regulation ... also calls on the Irish government to “go further” and pass Labour’s Exploitation and Trafficking Bill.
This would require companies to report annually on the measures they are taking to ensure that forced labour materials aren’t in their products.
“Irish people want to know that when we shop on our own high streets, we’re not contributing to misery and exploitation elsewhere,” she says.
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