The silk road to China has a dirty secret. Not of silk, but of cotton. The fabled cities on its route, Samarkand and Bukhara and the rest, are home to the world's largest state-run system of child labour. A system from which you and I benefit, almost every time we go shopping for clothes.
Back in April, I wrote here about my visit to the sweatshops of Bangladesh, where my jeans were made. While there, I asked the factory owners and traders where the cotton came from. Nobody would say. Back home, I asked retailers in the UK; they claimed not to know.
Then I got hold of a Bangladeshi rag-trade newsletter, and all became clear. Bangladesh – the biggest supplier of clothes to high-street retailers across Europe – gets half of its cotton from Uzbekistan.
I have been to Uzbekistan twice. It is an unpleasant place, an authoritarian former Soviet regime on the silk road, from where the British ambassador was messily removed a few years back for exposing human-rights abuses. And cotton is at the root of its many evils.
Uzbekistan empties its rivers to irrigate its cotton fields. That is why the Aral Sea, once the world's fourth largest inland sea, is drying up. Three years ago, I stood on the former shoreline and looked out across 100 kilometres of new, unexplored desert between me and the small saline sump that is all that remains of the sea.
All round the shore, towns and villages that once caught fish and grew crops are emptying. People with some of the highest rates of cancer in the world were fleeing a waterless land infested with salt and chemicals from the dried up sea bed.
And there is more. Across the country, the regime of Islam Karimov, the country's president, conscripts tens of thousands of children from state schools to pick the cotton harvest every year. In defiance of all international norms, as a new report out this week from the London-based Environmental Justice Foundation makes clear.
This exploitation is not new. The cotton used to be used to make Red Army uniforms; now it makes glad rags for the west. And while fashion houses and chain stores are very keen to tell us every detail about the source of their fair-trade and organic cotton, they operate a "don't ask, don't tell" policy as regards the cotton for their rest of their clothing.
Thomas Reinhart, who runs the giant cotton trading company Paul Reinhart, told one British newspaper a couple of years ago that he had never heard of the use of child labour in the region. "We buy our cotton from government agencies and don't know what happens out in the fields". Well, in my view, he should.
Fred Pearce, senior environment correspondent ***************** -The hemp plant is highly resistant to most insect and disease, largely eliminating the need for most (or all) pesticides and herbicides.[xix]
-No herbicides have been approved for industrial hemp. Early planting, as soon as the soil is warm enough, is a recommended weed control strategy.[xx]
-A normal stand of 200 to 300 plants per square meter shades out weeds, leaving the fields weed-free at harvest and covered in leaves that improve the soil in a self-mulching eco-system.[xxi]
-Industrial hemp can be grown on a wide variety of soil types, but tends to grow best on land that produces high yields of corn.[xxii]
-Hemp prefers a mild climate, humid atmosphere, and a rainfall of at least 25-30 inches per year. [xxiii]
-A hemp field produces a very large bulk of plant material in a short period of time. (Stalks can reach 15 feet tall in 70-90 growing days)[xxiv] [xxv]
-Yields can reach between 3 to 7 tons of dry hemp fibre stalk per acre.[xxvi]
-HEMP IS THE NUMBER ONE biomass producer on planet earth: 10 tons per acre in approximately four months. It is a woody plant containing 77% cellulose. Wood produces 60% cellulose.[xxvii]
-Low abrasion means low impact on farm equipment and workers hands. [xxviii]
-Hemp was one of Canada's first agricultural exports when the fibre was sold to Britain and France for use in their navies. It was common practice for tracts of land to be issued to settlers in Canada on the provision that they grow hemp.[xxix]
-During World War II the U.S. government relaxed the anti-hemp laws and spurred mid-western farmers to grow over a million acres of the plant for the war effort. “Hemp For Victory” was the name of the informational film made by U.S. Department of Agriculture in 1942.[xxx] Decades later they denied they ever made the film. This was disproven by researchers in 1989 when they found evidence of it at the Library of Congress.[xxxi]
-Of all the hemp grown in Canada this year, almost all of it was for seed, oil and construction material. Little went to the fabric industry. Most fabric is imported from China and Europe. [xxxii]
Fibres, Fabric & Clothing:
-The agriculture world’s longest and most durable natural fibres are hemp’s ‘bast’ fibres, contained in the bark of the plant’s stalk. [xxxiii]
-In 1853, the first pair of Levi’s jeans was made. And they were made from of hemp.[xxxiv]
-The word canvas (traditionally made from hemp) comes from cannabis (Latin). This word comes from kaneh-bosem, Hebrew for ‘aromatic cane’. [xxxv]
-Un-dyed hemp fabric will not rot and won’t fade in sunlight.[xxxvi] [xxxvii]
-Hemp is anti-microbial, anti-mildew, naturally UV resistant and readily takes on eco-safe plant-based dyes. [xxxviii]
-Frequently blended with cotton, silk, tencel, bamboo, spandex and other fibres to make a wide variety of fabrics with various attractive properties. It is also an efficient insulator keeping you warm in winter and cool in summer.[xxxix]
-It is said that a parachute rigging made of hemp saved the life of George Bush Sr. when the young bomber pilot bailed out of his burning plane.[xl]
-Hemp softens with each washing, without fibre degradation.[xli] As the saying goes: “Hemp doesn’t wear out, it wears in.”[xlii]
Compared to Cotton:
-Environmentally, hemp is a safer crop to grow than cotton. Cotton is a soil-damaging crop and needs a great deal of fertilizers, herbicides and pesticides.[xliii]
-Cotton crops in the USA occupy 1% of the country’s farmland but use 50% of all pesticides. [xliv]
-1 acre of hemp will produce as much as 2-3 acres of cotton.[xlv]
-Hemp is 4 times warmer than cotton, 4 times more water absorbent, has 3 times the tensile strength of cotton. It is also many times more durable and is flame retardant.[xlvi]
-Many high fashion clothing manufacturers have produced clothes and footwear made with hemp. Some of these include: Nike, Converse, Armani, Patagonia, Polo Ralph Lauren, Oscar de la Renta and many more.[xlvii]
-Hemp fabrics were once far more expensive than cotton and other fabrics due to limited supply, but increased demand and availability in recent years have lowered the price considerably. [xlviii]
-Hemp breathes well and wicks moisture away from the body better than cotton. [xlix]
-Hemptown (Canada’s largest hemp t-shirt supplier) asserts that selecting their hemp/cotton blended t-shirt over an all-cotton t-shirt saves the environment 744 gallons of water. This company has recently been funded by Canada’s National Research Council to create an enzyme that will make hemp fibres as soft as cotton.[l]
http://www.hempfarm.org/Papers/Hemp_Facts.html
"Would you have freedom from wage-slavery.." Joe Hill "http://iamawobbly.multiply.com/
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