Zara owner Inditex wants answers from Better Cotton after an environmental nonprofit linked the Spanish fashion giant to corruption, illegal deforestation, land grabbing and violence against local communities through two certified Brazilian cotton producers.The allegations by London-based Earthsight “represent a serious breach in the trust placed in Better Cotton’s certification process by both our group and our product suppliers,” Javier Losada, Inditex’s head of sustainability, told Better Cotton CEO Alan McClay in an April 8 letter that was first reported by Spanish news site Modaes on Wednesday. “The trust that we place in such processes developed by independent organizations, such as yours, is key to our supply chain control strategy.”Losada wrote that Inditex had waited six months for the results of a Better Cotton investigation into Earthsight’s findings that was promised at the end of March. A spokesperson for the Geneva- and London-based program, which touts more sustainable cotton grown with less water, fewer pesticides and healthier yields for farmers, told Sourcing Journal on Monday that it will provide further details after it has analyzed the results of the audit it commissioned in the wake of Earthsight’s research, which was published on Thursday.One thing that worries Marzia Lanfranchi, founder of the Cotton Diaries, an initiative that works to reshape the way the story of cotton is being told in more positive ways, is that Brazilian cotton could be villanized and even shunned because of bad PR. It happened to Chinese cotton because of the human rights crisis in Xinjiang. And it happened when Brazilian leather production was connected with the razing of the Amazon.Still, there’s a “huge difference” between family farming and “huge conglomerates that are linked to mining, oil,” she said. Lanfranchi said that instead of “pointing fingers,” brands should be trying to better understand the way various supply chain actors operate and how they can do things better. “You can’t just problem shift by sourcing from another region because all cotton regions have problems and all fibers have problems,” she said. “It’s become clear that we have to take responsibility as companies toward creating solutions within the supply chains that we already have.”Carvalho said that the problem with existing or burgeoning deforestation legislation is that they don’t cover cotton. Companies, he said, need to be dissuaded from bad behavior through the stronger government action that has “been missing.”“I don’t believe there is an easy way to strengthen Better Cotton to a point where it would be reliable enough that the industry could trust it to ensure the cotton is sustainable and legal,” he said. “I think the only way is regulation—legally binding regulation. Certification schemes might have a limited role to play in aiding companies to carry out their diligence but they cannot replace proper regulation and law enforcement. The voluntary commitments that we’ve seen from the private sector have not been enough.”And the point is that brands, including H&M and Inditex, have a number of human rights and environmental policies in place, which means that they have a responsibility to ensure that their raw materials aren’t stoking environmental destruction or human rights violations, Carvalho said.“What they need to do now is to actually put the right measures in place to make sure that those plans and those policies are implemented,” he added. “[​​They] need to know the individual farms where [their] cotton is coming from. That requires understanding what happens with the cotton throughout the supply chain at every stage of the production process.” (ICE NEW YORK)

Fonte notizia: Are H&M and Zara Driving Deforestation in Brazil?