Cotton Made in Africa (CmiA)’s partners made significant strides last year, Aid by Trade Foundation (AbTF), the nonprofit organization responsible for the standard, revealed in a recently released report.
Aggregated verification results from 2023 found that the largest program for sustainable cotton from Africa’s verified partners achieved “good” to “very good” ratings across its four sustainability pillars. Prosperity performed preeminently, followed by people, management and planet.
Highlights include conducting 23 verification missions (13 at the field level, 10 in cotton ginneries) at 20 cotton companies in 11 countries in Sub-Sahara Africa. Around 900,000 CmiA farmers worked 1.7 million hectares of land, verified under the CmiA and CmiA Organic standards, to produce about 508,000 tons of ginned cotton—the equivalent of about a billion T-shirts.
These standards were “extensively revised” in 2022 with the general structure, terminology, formulation of criteria, rating system and pesticide undergoing an “evolution,” so to speak, with updated expectations, including the introduction of the aforementioned pillars. The 2023 Aggregated Verification & Implementation Report is the second of its kind to analyze the field- and ginnery-level implementation of the CmiA standard’s fourth volume.
“Verifications ensure the credibility of our standards. The latest results clearly show that our close collaboration with local partners, some of whom we have worked with for years, is making cotton cultivation in Africa better and more attractive in the long term,” said Elena Wahrenberg, the CmiA verification manager at the AbTF. “Through our wide and varied training program, we will continue doing everything we can to build up the adaptability and resilience of small-scale farmers and their systems.”
Compared to the aggregated verification results from 2022, “significant improvements” were made across the board in all areas except the planet pillar, where there was a “slight deterioration” of 0.1 score points, per the report.
“Dignified working conditions and support for small-scale farmers were evaluated as ‘very good,’ due in part to the emphasis placed on protecting the rights and health of employees and laborers through appropriate working hours,” the Green Button-recognized organization said. “Regarding environmental aspects, CmiA cotton continues to be cultivated strictly without genetically modified seeds and without irrigation using surface water or groundwater.”
MMP Agro, an agricultural processing company out of Uganda, became a new CmiA Organic partner last year after successfully passing the first verification cycle, bringing the total number of verified cotton companies (according to CmiA and CmiA Organic) up to 20. On the other hand, a partnership with a cotton company from Nigeria “expired” while several cotton companies in Benin, Tanzania and Zambia were onboarding in 2023.
Also in 2023, CmiA verified cotton companies conducted farm level trainings on various topics—ranging from subjects like basic agricultural techniques and conservation agriculture to gender and child labor and farmer business school—with a total participation of 91 percent male and 9 percent female smallholder farmers, in line with the gender shares of CmiA-contracted cotton farmers in 2023.
The sustainably grown African cotton initiative’s overall performance results of the 12 principles (including responsible business conduct, decent working conditions and improvement of farmers’ resilience) varied, but improved year over year. High marks were given to criteria related to transparency in the supply chain, including “compliance with traceability requirements for CmiA cotton in the chain, a transparent classification and payment system for seed cotton,” as well as timely payments to contracted cultivators.
The report also highlights various projects and events co-financed by the AbTF to support small-scale farmers—and ensure the CmiA’s standards were followed. This included multilateral collaborations like CAR-iSMa, a cooperation project initiated by AbTF supported by the Deutsche Gesellschaft für internationale Zusammenarbeit (GIZ) that aims to help around 100,000 small farmers in developing new strategies to combat the effects of climate change.
The CmiA initiative was founded in 2005, falling under the Hamburg-based AbTF’s umbrella. Its objective is to link African smallholders with trading companies and fashion brands through the global textile value chain, in an effort to improve the livelihood and working conditions of nearly one million cotton farmers.
Source: https://finance.yahoo.com/