If biofuels are so bad, why aren't we campaigning against cotton?

Biofuels are currently being accused of starving the world of food, by taking over badly needed land and water. But the fact is, cotton deprives food growers of much more water and good farming land than biofuels.

If we weren't already doing it, and somebody today came up with the idea of taking over the world's fields to grow clothes, there'd be a huge stink. So is it time for a reassessment of cotton and other non-food crops?

The charge list against cotton is long. Cotton drained the Aral Sea in central Asia. I have stood on the former shoreline at Muynak in Uzbekistan and looked out across the 100 kilometres of desert you'd have to cross to find the sea. No water gets down the rivers that once topped up the inland sea, because it is also taken to irrigate fields of cotton to make clothes for sale in our high streets and shopping malls.

It takes 25 bathtubs of water to grow enough cotton for one T-shirt. Cotton also helps empty the River Indus in Pakistan and the Nile in Egypt. Its cultivation uses up 35 million hectares of farmland, an area the size of Germany, and soaks up a tenth of all the world's pesticides.

We know that the corn needed to fill an SUV tank with bioethanol could feed an African for a year. But how many mouths could be fed with the land and water taken to grow my T-shirt?

And the geopolitics of cotton sounds not unlike the emerging geopolitics of biofuels. The globalisation of cotton production started with the British Empire, when vast areas in India, Egypt and elsewhere were turned over to cotton growing in order to feed Lancashire cotton mills. People starved in their millions as a result.

That is worth bearing in mind if you think the warnings being made today about the potential impact of biofuels on feeding the planet are far-fetched.

So my point is not that we can excuse biofuels because we have always been using precious resources to grow non-food crops. Rather, it is to wonder why those other crops still get a free ride.

Should we sacrifice our cotton T-shirts in order to allow people to eat? What about other fibres like flax and hemp? Or narcotics? Or timber? We all like natural forests, of course, but what about all those monoculture plantations growing wood for pulp?

Now, economists will argue that the world is simple: that rising prices for commodities, including food, stimulate production. We can have our cake and eat it, too. And to some extent they are right.

But in a world of empty granaries and rising food prices, this is a debate worth having. And, while biofuels need to be in the environmental dock, it is time we cottoned on to the fact that some of these other non-food crops should also be under interrogation.

Fred Pearce, senior environment correspondent

Labels: cotton, energy, freds-footprint

On the surface, the figures show the genetically modified Bt cotton produced by Monsanto and a number of Indian partners has had real success in India. The seed produces its own insecticide, and its market share rose from 12% to 62% between 2003 and 2005. But according to Glenn Stone of Washington University in St Louis, the numbers hide the fact that the modified seeds are in fact contributing to a "complete breakdown in the cotton cultivation system".

Stone looked at cotton production in the Warangal district of Andhra Pradesh in India. He found that new seeds flooded the markets every year: in 2005, there were 78 different brands of cottonseed being sold, but only 24 of those had been around in 2003. You can read his research paper here.

Stone reckons the high turnover reflects a breakdown of the traditional approach of testing the performance of seeds and then sticking to the best ones. Instead, Stone found that the farmers increasingly rely on word-of-mouth, getting advice from their neighbours on what seeds to use – which is all well and good until everyone is relying on everyone else, which is what he says is going on now.

The confusion is exacerbated by the fact that some companies have taken seeds that have fallen out of favour, and successfully re-launched them under new names.

So it looks like introducing large numbers of new GM seeds, whatever the effect on yield, brings the risk of undermining traditional - and effective - farming practices. I have to say, blaming it all on company greediness is a bit easy. In other parts of the world, traditional farmers have been more wary of GM seeds. For example, in the Atlas Mountains of Morocco, farmers have retained their approach to selecting seeds, despite a government drive to introduce GM versions. (I wrote about this in a chapter of a book called Dry in 2006.)

Catherine Brahic, Online environment reporter

Labels: cotton, genetically modified, India