Fashion Crimes THE EUROPEAN RETAIL GIANTS LINKED TO DIRTY BRAZILIAN COTTON
Earthsight’s year-long investigation reveals that cotton used by two of the world’s largest fast fashion companies, H&M and Zara, is linked to large-scale deforestation, land grabbing, human rights abuses and violent land conflicts in the Brazilian Cerrado, a biome known as the world’s most biodiverse savannah.
The destruction being wrought in the Cerrado – home to five per cent of the world’s species (including giant armadillos, tapirs, jaguars, rheas) – by industrial agriculture has been even worse than that seen in the Amazon. About half of the biome’s native vegetation has been lost. Nearly a fifth of its species, including the maned wolf and blue-eyed ground dove, face extinction due to habitat loss. Major Cerrado rivers could see their water levels drop by a third by 2050 due mostly to deforestation and overexploitation.
Over the last decade Brazilian cotton has gained prominence in the global fashion market. The country is now the world’s second largest exporter and expected to be the number one cotton supplier by 2030. In the decade to 2023, Brazil’s exports more than doubled. Almost all this cotton is grown in the Cerrado.
Our investigators found that H&M and Zara’s clothes suppliers in Asia source cotton grown in the western portion of the Brazilian state of Bahia by two of the country’s largest producers: SLC Agrícola and the Horita Group.
Both companies are implicated in some of Brazil’s most egregious land grabbing cases. In Bahia’s municipality of Formosa do Rio Preto, Horita has been closely linked to the violent land disputes pitting a mega agribusiness estate against traditional communities, known as geraizeiros, that have inhabited the area since the 19th century. More than 10 years ago geraizeiros started experiencing harassment and violence by armed men working for the estate. In 2018, Bahia’s attorney general found the estate was one of the largest areas of public land grabbed in Brazilian history and launched a lawsuit against it to recover these lands.
In the municipality of Correntina, large agribusinesses are accused of misappropriating public lands inhabited by the traditional community of Capão do Modesto to convert them into protected areas for their farms in a process known as ‘green land grabbing’. Instead of setting aside part of their productive properties for environmental conservation, several agribusinesses have acquired land elsewhere for this purpose. Both the Horita Group and SLC Agrícola have cotton farms in Bahia that are linked to green land grabbing at Capão do Modesto. Bahia’s attorney general has referred to Capão as "one of the most serious land grabbing cases in Bahia,” and requested the cancellation of all land titles overlapping it. The local community has suffered harassment, surveillance and attacks carried out by gunmen linked to the agribusinesses.
The Horita Group and SLC Agrícola have a brazen history of environmental infractions in western Bahia, where both companies have been repeatedly fined for illegal deforestation. SLC has been named one of the top deforesters in the Cerrado. Some of its cotton farms in western Bahia have lost at least 40,000 hectares of native vegetation in the last 12 years. Earthsight conservatively estimates Horita has cleared at least 30,000ha over the last 20 years, but the true number is probably closer to 60,000ha.
As part of their sustainability efforts, H&M and Zara rely on a fundamentally flawed ethical supply chain certification system called Better Cotton (BC). The cotton we linked to land rights and environmental abuses in Bahia carried the Better Cotton label. This should not be surprising. The scheme suffers from several weaknesses, including in relation to requirements on compliance with local laws, respect for local communities’ rights and illegal deforestation. A new traceability system being rolled out in the coming years is woefully inadequate as it only traces cotton back to the country of origin, not to individual farms. Earthsight also identified worrying problems with BC’s accreditation and compliance systems. In Brazil, a national cotton producers’ association (ABRAPA) is in charge of the certification programme, a serious conflict of interest.