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- Herausgeber: John Wiley & Sons
- Kategorie: Fachliteratur
- Serie: PRS - Polity Resources series
- Sprache: Englisch
Whether we are out on the streets or between the sheets, cotton is our constant companion. But behind this ubiquitous fibre prized for its softness lies a darker story of exploitation and hardship. In this penetrating analysis, Adam Sneyd explores the power politics that envelop cotton as major corporate players and countries across Africa, Asia and the Americas compete to control it. In the aftermath of sweatshop scandal exposes and factory collapse disasters, merchants and retailers have called for better cotton farming practices. But in seeking to prevent the next transnational media circus, will companies simply end up cementing business-as-usual? Corporate public relations strategy now competes directly with the voices of an alternative global community that seeks to fundamentally transform the way that cotton is farmed. Yet these demands for cotton to work better for people and the planet have flown under the radar as media attention has focused instead on farmer subsidies and prices. From the local to the global, this book takes the reader on an illuminating journey through the multifaceted and often grubby politics of the fluffy white stuff in the world economy. The pile of political laundry it uncovers is voluminous but, as Sneyd argues, must be aired in the interests of sustainability and development.
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Contents
Cover
Title Page
Copyright
Acknowledgments
1 Spinning a Fibrous Tale
Notes
2 The World Cotton (Dis)Order
Thinking about world orders
The new cotton order
States in the cotton order
Big business and the cotton order
Alternative voices ordering cotton
Non-state geopolitics and power over cotton
Forward into the cotton order
Notes
3 Cotton on the Land
A tale of two farms
The fiber/food trade-off
A grounded geopolitics
Notes
4 Cotton for the Country
Controlling minds, controlling the countryside
Crafting national industries
Seeing like a state: cotton and industrialization
Notes
5 Cotton in Company Hands
Financialized cotton
Physical cotton
The politics of business countervailing business
Notes
6 Beyond the Dirty White Stuff
Notes
Afterword: A Learner in the World Cotton Order
Notes
Selected Readings
Index
End User License Agreement
Guide
Cover
Table of Contents
Begin Reading
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Resources Series
Peter Dauvergne & Jane Lister, Timber
Michael Nest, Coltan
Elizabeth R. DeSombre & J. Samuel Barkin, Fish
Jennifer Clapp, Food 2nd edition
David Lewis Feldman, Water
Gavin Fridell, Coffee
Gavin Bridge & Philippe Le Billon, Oil
Derek Hall, Land
Ben Richardson, Sugar
Ian Smillie, Diamonds
Cotton
ADAM SNEYD
polity
Copyright © Adam Sneyd 2016
The right of Adam Sneyd to be identified as Author of this Work has been asserted in accordance with the UK Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.
First published in 2016 by Polity Press
Polity Press65 Bridge StreetCambridge CB2 1UR, UK
Polity Press350 Main StreetMalden, MA 02148, USA
All rights reserved. Except for the quotation of short passages for the purpose of criticism and review, no part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise, without the prior permission of the publisher.
ISBN: 978-1-5095-0138-0
A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Names: Sneyd, Adam, 1978- author.Title: Cotton / Adam Sneyd.Description: Cambridge, UK ; Malden, MA : Polity Press, [2016] | Includes bibliographical references and index.Identifiers: LCCN 2016002125| ISBN 9780745681979 (hardback : alk. paper) | ISBN 9780745681986 (pbk. : alk. paper)Subjects: LCSH: Cotton trade--Political aspects. | Cotton--Economic aspects. | Cotton--Political aspects. | Economic development--Political aspects.Classification: LCC HD9070.5 .S64 2016 | DDC 338.1/7351--dc23 LC record available at http://lccn.loc.gov/2016002125
The publisher has used its best endeavours to ensure that the URLs for external websites referred to in this book are correct and active at the time of going to press. However, the publisher has no responsibility for the websites and can make no guarantee that a site will remain live or that the content is or will remain appropriate.
Every effort has been made to trace all copyright holders, but if any have been inadvertently overlooked the publisher will be pleased to include any necessary credits in any subsequent reprint or edition.
For further information on Polity, visit our website: politybooks.com
Acknowledgments
As I drafted this book, I consistently consulted the other Resources Series titles. I am consequently grateful to Jennifer Clapp, Peter Dauvergne, Jane Lister, Gavin Fridell, Derek Hall, Ben Richardson, Ian Smillie and to all of the other Resources authors.
That said, I bear sole responsibility if the content herein in any way fails to match the high standards that they have set. I am also highly indebted to all of the individuals that anonymously and keenly reviewed this project at the outset and prior to publication. At the University of Guelph, Danielle Mihok provided impeccable research assistance during the early phases, and while I focused on the write up, Steffi Hamann expertly took the reins on our new research program on commodity politics in Central Africa. Many colleagues at Guelph and beyond also enabled this book through supporting the development of my academic career. And Lauren Sneyd pushed me hard to make the manuscript come together on my sabbatical while we were visiting St Francis Xavier University. Thanks are due to Michael Cvetanovic for the wonderful time that Lauren and I were able to spend in Nova Scotia at Eagle’s Nest, Malignant Cove, and also to Michael Sloopka and Kyle Harloff. I would also like to thank the members of the WTO Secretariat who helped me to engage directly with several high-level personalities involved in the global governance of cotton. Finally, at Polity, Pascal Porcheron and Nekane Tanaka Galdos were excellent shepherds, and Louise Knight’s impeccable editorial expertise and patience allowed this book to see the light of day.
CHAPTER ONESpinning a Fibrous Tale
Resources like cotton are all about economics. Right? Think about it. Many daily newspapers and weekly news magazines give us good reason to believe that commodities are simply a humdrum piece of the economic system that enables modern consumer life. In print publications, stories about resources are often buried deep at the back of the business section. Online, the story tends to be much the same: typically, you have to go digging to find out what’s going on in gold. Neoclassical economists, for their part, have convinced many media consumers and aspiring students that economics is the best discipline through which commodities like uranium can be understood. This radioactive viewpoint has had a significant half-life. And the fallout is evident every day on campuses around the world where or when students assert that abstract mathematical models are the sole route to “hard” knowledge about oil, pork bellies or other greasy commodities.
And the good news is that it is relatively easy to cut through this slick perspective. As commodity prices, resource exploration and investments boomed in the early 2000s, global resources became big academic business. Thereafter, when the global commodity bubble burst in 2014, an army of analysts stood at the ready to clean up the mess. Part of this clean-up crew rejected conventional neoclassical views on resource economics. They argued that analysts needed to foreground resource politics. In this light, commodity politics was seen to be too consequential to cover up or assume away. In putting politics at the center of their analyses, researchers working on raw materials as diverse as coffee and diamonds embraced a foundational premise of classical political economy. Their works – including all contributions to Polity’s Resources Series – underscore the fundamental inseparability of politics and economics at all levels. Under this influence, political analysts in the clean-up crew do not consider the economics of global resources in isolation from their domestic, international, or global politics. Here, the shared understanding is that politics were as much a part of the story of guano in nineteenth-century Peru as they are of coltan in present-day Democratic Republic of Congo.
A big part of the challenge of wresting control over serious analysis and commentary on commodities from neoclassical economics relates to the language we still use to describe these goods. As a descriptor, perhaps “raw materials” best captures what people intend to do with the stuff that is used to make up other products. As such, on purely economic grounds, it makes sense that we continue to refer to bulk quantities of undifferentiated raw materials as primary commodities. But in drawing our focus only to those standard characteristics, the language we use every day can obscure more than it reveals. Through directing our attention solely to these goods themselves, users and abusers of the term “commodities” can effectively sanitize or “disappear” the processes that underpin the production of materials as diverse as timber and sugar. There are a great many companies and individuals around the globe that have deep interests in presenting commodity “stories” to be primarily about market movements. Up-to-date knowledge about financial and commercial developments related to the lifeblood of industrial business-as-usual is assuredly a corporate essential. But the raw deals that plantation workers and forests have reaped are equally a part of the commodity politics status quo. In the interest of getting those broader stories out more often, it might be helpful if we all took a cue from the slogan of Cotton Incorporated, the US-based cotton promotion agency. After all, resources or commodities are absolutely the “fabrics of our lives.”
And the curious thing about cotton is that this fabric of our lives has flown largely under the radar. Unlike tea or peanuts, few people get to see the unadulterated raw stuff. There is also little doubt that most fans of the hit 1990s sitcom Seinfeld are blissfully unaware that Julia Louis-Dreyfus, one of the leads in that series, bears the family name of the leading global cotton merchant. Louis Dreyfus Commodities to this day remains a seemingly inoffensive family-run affair. And, truth be told, an extended discussion of the intricacies of that firm’s daily operations could easily glaze the eyes of both ardent Seinfeld fans and critics alike the world over. But stay tuned: those activities are unquestionably coated in layers of political intrigue.
Sticking with another cultural product of the United States for a moment then – American college football – cotton has been similarly banal. The annual Cotton Bowl Classic had for years featured teams of marginal significance to the national rankings, and was only recently resuscitated by Goodyear, a tire and rubber company. In the heartland of the United States, this fiber has been so ostensibly bland that many Americans colloquially refer to confections spun from sugar as “cotton candy.” In so doing, they have put a stamp of sweetness on a fiber with an otherwise unflattering flavor profile. Cotton candy does have a better ring to it than the reality – that this inedible fiber in raw form tastes atrociously bitter.
Activists, academics, and students have also contributed in their own small ways to the relative obscurity of cotton itself. Some of the biggest global campaigns of the past twenty years on issues linked directly to globalization and your T-shirts have missed this crop by a figurative “micronaire.” The latter term is industry jargon for the measurement of just how thick the cell walls of cotton fibers are. Quality experts consider the thickness of the micronaire to be a key indicator of fiber quality. So, to be blunt, when it came to cotton, anti-sweatshop activism was then a little thin. Without a doubt, the hard work of labor activists to expose pay and workplace health and safety scandals in Indonesia, China, and elsewhere has been spot on and effective. In the 1990s, Jeffrey Ballinger and other leading lights in the clean clothes movement achieved fantastic results when they pushed the big branded clothing retailers to develop and introduce new standards for their suppliers.1 And they did so once again in the aftermath of the factory fire and collapse scandals in Bangladesh, and also after many of the initial supplier codes failed to yield the hoped-for textile and garment worker benefits and protections.
But for every ounce of sweat shed by those devoted to making shop floors better for people and the planet, it can still seem that only a few drams have been shed in the service of making cotton work better for those that grow it. Given the persistent prominence of sweatshops in the global mediascape, that would be a reasonable surface-level impression. However, the reality revealed through research is strikingly different. High-level transnational political dramas have played out on cotton specifically over the past decades. This book will detail many of the consequential machinations and maneuvers that have recently changed the world order for cotton. Today, civil society groups, big businesses, and governments have latched onto the idea that the world needs cotton that is farmed and traded more ethically and sustainably. And a broadly shared understanding on how to best facilitate the realization of those noble objectives has not emerged. As such, there has been a profusion of high-stakes politics. This politics provides especially gripping material for political junkies because many industry insiders continue to deny its existence. Some directly reject the proposition that the cotton business is fundamentally political. And their denials are as political as they are ridiculous.
My task in writing this contribution to the Resources Series is to convince you that the geopolitics of cotton is anything but the stuff of a staid global commodity trade.2 The transnational politics associated with this fiber is also not an impenetrable thicket. This tangled mass of high-level interrelationships and low-level chicanery can be unwound. And it should be in the interest of enhancing the uptake of fashionable and enduring principles, including informed global citizenship and ethical consumption.
Take for example some of the politics of cotton on the land. One of the biggest and most long-standing farmer dilemmas with this crop is enveloped in politics. The perennial question that hangs over every individual farmer and the global industry as a whole is rather straightforward. Should we plant cotton, or should we plant something else? Politics often bears directly on this choice where and when legislation or policy offers support to those that choose to grow it. It also comes into play in places where individual farmers do not get to make that choice directly. Owing to their status as tenants, workers or disempowered family members, sometimes the principal farmers of cotton tend not to be the ones that hold the power to make decisions about whether or not they should go with it.
The derivative questions linked to the choice to plant cotton are equally political. If we do plant cotton, how will we feed ourselves? And if we do not plant cotton, how will we feed ourselves? The idea of cottonseeds fried in cottonseed oil with a side of mashed cotton plant might have quirky appeal to comfortable people that do not confront this dilemma. But the food question is serious for those that face it. Farmers must be convinced that they can navigate the trade-off between cotton in the ground and their capacity to make food available or to access food at the market. For some producers with full bellies, this is a marginal consideration. But for the vast majority of those involved with cotton globally, there is no doubt that the food issue is overarching. And many powerful voices with an interest in keeping cotton on the land seek to influence farmer answers to the food question.
The politics of securing cotton for the country is perhaps better known. Many states that produce cotton, or that rely on it for industry, have for centuries attempted to control the fiber at home and abroad.3 Where national interests have been linked to the availability of cotton, and business and high-level politics have become intertwined, many world-changing stocks and flows have emerged and become entrenched. For instance, when business interests in securing cheap cotton and furthering the industrial development of cotton were equated with the national interest in Britain, imports of finished fabrics from the Empire were curtailed. Subsequently, after the stock of textile firms was bolstered at home, British fabrics flooded the realm where the sun never set on British exports. Moreover, as demands for cheaper cotton from industry grew, the total global stock of enslaved people simultaneously rose. Cross-border flows of slaves and cotton fueled “economic growth” and industrialization in Britain, and then in the rest of Europe and the United States. Along with sugar, cotton underpinned this hideous system. And controlling cotton for the country has also been a dirty business for “free” farmers at home. Many smallholders around the globe have suffered in the name of national industrial development. In a range of diverse places, cotton farmers have been seriously exploited. Over the course of the last century and down to today, many have been short-changed via the payment of artificially low prices.4 Where governments have intervened to keep farm-gate prices low or businesses have colluded to reduce payouts, farmers have faced effective taxes on their outputs. And these “taxes” have sometimes lined the pockets of industry insiders. At other times, they have been used to subsidize the emergence of employment-generating spinning and weaving manufacturing operations of varying quality and durability.
On another front, cotton in company hands is a persistent source of political rhetoric and controversy. Corporations involved in the buying and processing of cotton to remove the seeds might seem to be pretty remote from big politics. At first glance, it could easily appear to be the case that company politics is of limited consequence beyond this industry. A political bribe here to get a standard shipping container there, for example. But the reality could not be more contrasting. Cotton company actions have considerable global political spillovers. For starters, domestic buyers and the transnational merchants that move cotton across borders are engaged in an activity that since the 1980s has become much more financially complex. Put simply, tools that enable companies to manage financial risks associated with cotton, such as futures contracts, have now become a really big part of this business. And the politics of futures and derivatives market regulation, or the lack thereof, and of financialization more generally, are matters of serious concern at the highest levels. Jennifer Clapp’s must-read analysis of developments in this area appears in the Resources Series in her wonderful book Food.5
Beyond the politics of finance, company control over cotton has yielded negative externalities that have accelerated global environmental change.6 The demand for ultra-white cotton that continues to emanate from some quarters has encouraged farming practices that, to put it mildly, have been far too intensive. As alternative approaches to cotton that rely less on agrochemicals have been successfully tested, companies that advance new ideas about cotton have emerged. These upstarts now challenge the old view that more chemicals and more water are necessary to grow quality fiber successfully. In the new order for cotton, companies can and do clash openly and politically over best practices.
Finally, the global cotton trade itself has animated renewed inter-state geopolitical conflict. Some states that export cotton and that are members of the World Trade Organization (WTO) have used WTO rules to challenge the cotton support policies of other WTO members.7 Brazil and a group of African countries that depend on cotton have pushed back against US cotton policies that they have deemed unfair. The former launched a trade dispute and ultimately received compensation, and the latter grouping was able to inject the cotton trade issue straight into the heart of ongoing trade negotiations. Unfortunately for the African group, after over a decade of negotiations on this topic, culminating in December 2015, scant progress was made on their political demands for liberalization.
The inter-state dimensions of cotton trade politics are also bigger than the subsidy issue. As Europe’s cotton policies have faced enhanced geopolitical scrutiny and Africa’s exports of raw cotton lint have shifted away from Europe towards Asia, a more regionally oriented geopolitics has emerged. The European Union has financially supported the efforts African countries have made to work together to add more value to cotton in Africa. This so-called “road map” aims to help Africans do more together to spin cotton up, dye it, weave it, and piece it together as garments. As such, Africans are now using European support to challenge the dominance of Asian-based firms in the cotton value chain. Not to be outdone, China has scaled up its cotton production volumes. As well, its domestic textile investors have been encouraged to “go out” in search of lower-cost production locations. Moreover, in 2014 when China released some of its massive cotton stockpile, its foreign suppliers were largely cut off. This political move reduced the raw material costs of its overseas textile interests and of the global textile industry as a whole. And in the context of this renewed geopolitics, several high-profile scandals linked to the political exercise of control over the cotton trade have come to light.8
This politics has not elicited the kind of attention that gets paid to what clothing and bedding designers actually do with cotton, or what they do on their own time. To a certain extent this is understandable. Raw material politics tends only to hit the front pages when it is associated directly with death, destruction, or impending economic doom. For instance, fans of the classic James Bond movies of the 1970s would surely not think about cotton as being central to the politics of the plot lines. As Bond, Sir Roger Moore’s numerous safari suits were a fashionable and enduring sidebar to all of that ticket-selling international intrigue. Today, the nightlife misadventures and errant tweets of leading fashionistas tend to get blanket social media coverage. Likes or shares of links related to their occasional commitments to source more “ethical” cotton, or simply to do better for the planet, have no hope of breaking the internet. But everybody still uses the stuff every day. If you did not dry off with a cotton towel this morning, you definitely will when you travel in search of your preferred paradise. If you can afford to do so. If not, cotton is omnipresent wherever you are, if you care enough to stop for a second to take a look.
Since this book is about the politics of cotton, I need to be straightforward with you about what you should not expect from it. First and foremost, this book is not intended to be a reference regarding cotton production and export volumes or trends. The secretariat of an inter-state, international organization – the International Cotton Advisory Committee (ICAC) – has been tasked with publishing detailed literature on those specifics on a regular basis. Similarly, if you are interested in reading extended analyses of price developments, market conditions, or trends, you will not find much in here. In that case, make sure that you check out the public access sections of the online Cotton Outlook market information subscriber service. Or get your credit card out to dig deeper into their database.
And if you really want to know more about the specifics of cotton policy in all producing and exporting countries, internet search engines should be your primary go-to. This applies doubly for those of you who might have or develop an interest in organic or fair-trade cotton standards, or in where you can purchase ethical or sustainable fashion online. Additionally, plenty of fantastic academic books and articles in scholarly journals on cotton have recently come out. So if you are itching to delve into the history of cotton in the world system, learn more about processes that aim to assure the quality of the fiber, or study the economics of the business in particular places, check out the Selected Readings that appear before the index. Just do not expect this book to engage too much with arcane academic debates.
You have in your hands a book on cotton that aims to push you to think about politics. To do so, it presents some theory out of necessity; hopefully in accessible language that has been sexed up enough to hold your attention. If it ever does not, please feel free to put it down and pursue your own exploration of what is going on under the cover of cotton in your neighborhood. When you are done, the analytical framework that I offer up will still be right here. This framework aims to impart the fundamentals of who gets to control cotton, where, and when. It directs attention to the principal ideas, institutions, and power relations that have shaped the status quo for cotton. Since the geopolitics of cotton is dynamic, this framework also enables us to grasp some of the forces and factors that facilitate change or create path dependencies in the global governance of this commodity.
Some might claim that this orientation is overly value laden. That a focus on politics can amount to no more than the politicized selection and presentation of biased information. But such an appraisal would neglect the gulf between polemics and the really “hard” science of political analysis. At the outset, let me assure you that industry self-promotion materials and the research that keeps cotton moving presuppose an enormous overarching value. They are weaved up with the fiber and fundamentally wedded to it. Consequently, it would be appropriate to consider this analytical book to offer a corrective or a “counter-narrative” on cotton.
As I see it, the governance of global resources is fundamentally about how states and non-state actors, working together or separately and at multiple levels, exercise control. It is about the exertion of direct influence over commodities. And it is also about the authority to make, enforce, or alter rules. The language used to debate what should continue to be done, and what should be done differently, is also a big part of stories about how commodities are ordered. To better understand global commodity governance today, vast insights can be gleaned from engagement with theories and approaches that are prominent in sociology, geography, international development studies, and political science. These include dependency theory, world-systems analysis, political ecology, and the political economy of development. If you are unfamiliar with any of those terms, a quick Google search or review of the literature could be instructive. But prior knowledge of those theories is not required to understand this book. As I indicated above, I do not belabor theory. I implicitly draw upon aspects of the first three approaches below, and present an overall analysis firmly grounded in the latter: the political economy of development.
Turning to cotton, global governance, and political change, globalization has contributed to opening up the spaces where the cotton order is created and performed to new players. And by globalization, I do not mean liberalization, privatization, deregulation or other phenomena associated with now out-of-fashion market fundamentalism. Globalization is about much more than the controversial basket of neoliberal economic policies that became known as the Washington Consensus or the “golden straitjacket.” I should also note that globalization should not be understood to be the same thing as neo-imperialism or neocolonialism. In my view, globalization is a term that should be used primarily to denote the shrinking of time and space, and the implications of this faster, smaller world for people. Over the past decades, as transboundary connections between people connected to cotton have become more intense, and also more extensive, a faster and smaller world has yielded a very different cotton order. Where once a standard alphabet soup of states and inter-state international organizations held court, today’s governance milieu features more diverse and fresher ingredients.
In seeking to set out and detail the politics of this thicker, spicier order for cotton, I should offer up two additional caveats. The first is that, as a political economist, my primary expertise falls in the area of development in the context of Africa. As such, I have tended in past publications to emphasize the implications of control over this crop for poorer and more marginalized people. And I continue to do so below. I make this choice not simply to emphasize the ongoing linkages between cotton and poverty, but to draw attention to the prospects for cotton to advance development. My view on what exactly development entails is very process-oriented, and is partly inspired by Amartya Sen.9 For me, development is a qualitative process of social, political, and economic change. It does not start or stop when goals, targets, or indicators are endorsed or found to have been met. And it is fundamentally about enabling people everywhere to lead lives that they value more. You will hear this perspective come ringing through as we encounter situations where cotton has been controlled in ways that have prevented people from leading better lives.
Turning to the second caveat, I am fundamentally agnostic when it comes to the utility of cotton for development and the quest for sustainability. Put another way, I am a disinterested political analyst. I have no vested interests in this crop or in ways of producing or trading it, and I am not unidirectionally for or against cotton. As an analyst, I have searched for context-specific and contingent answers to the contributions that the exercise of control over cotton makes or does not make to sustainable development. Despite the United Nations endorsement of the sustainable development goals, this term remains an essentially contested concept. The Brundtland Commission’s definition – meeting the needs of the present without compromising the ability of future generations to meet their own needs – was clear enough. But many assessments of sustainable development and cotton have continued to be highly subjective. Sometimes they have even been penned by those with vested interests who are much less open about their biases than I am. As an essentially contested concept, other genuine analysts and central players in the political dramas that I detail might advance understandings or assessments of sustainable development that are different than my own. And there simply is no way of arriving at a final, universal answer regarding whose definition or analysis is most appropriate. Bearing this limitation in mind, I do my best in this book to identify the consequential ideological flash points on development and sustainability that persist in the global governance of cotton. And from an analytical perspective and not from an ideological soapbox, I am convinced that numerous stakeholders in cotton have an interest in obscuring the politics of sustainability.
To launch the geopolitical analysis at the core of this book, I present my framework in chapter 2. This extended chapter introduces the prominent ideas, consequential institutions, and power relations that make up the world order for cotton. In it, I spell out my understanding of the evolution and dynamics of the really big-picture geopolitics. As this is the most theoretically inclined presentation in the book, it necessarily contains some generalities and a dash of abstract language. But fear not. The alarming realities presented in that chapter are scarier than the academic jargon. Thereafter, each subsequent chapter focuses on specific dimensions of the order and the related geopolitics. And to be clear, in those chapters I aim to speak to the politics of cotton directly. As such, I do not dwell on or retell the old chestnuts or the usual stories that experts might expect to find in a work on this subject. For me, as the teller of this politically oriented tale, it makes little sense to re-present the well-known social, economic, and environmental histories of cotton. Brilliant books on those painful histories have recently hit the shelves.
Consequently, in chapter 3 we turn to the politics of cotton on the land. To reveal this politics and make it more comprehensible, I have drawn heavily upon heuristics. As such, I offer numerous stories and examples that have been designed to emphasize a broad spectrum of land politics. These examples and stories offer models or approximations of the decision-making realities that cotton farmers navigate. In particular, they showcase a range of household land use, investment decisions, and trade-offs, and the associated politics. And the rationale that fueled this strategy is straightforward: perfect knowledge about political reality is not possible, given the scope and aims of this book and of the Resources Series. I could have offered a suite of anecdotal evidence drawn from across the world to back each and every one of my claims about politics. But the volume would have been at least four times as thick and much more of a chore to cut into. Instead, I have made a conscious decision as an educator to embrace a storytelling approach. It simply emphasizes the politics more fully and accessibly than any available alternative.
In chapter 4, the narrative turns to the politics of securing cotton for the country. Here I tell tales about the control that states exercise over minds and bodies. States generally seek to reproduce cotton to advance the “national interests” that they define. At times, those interests have taken the form of top-down efforts to secure more reliable or predictable foreign exchange earnings. At others, they have sought to make cotton work for industrialization. And at both times the social and ecological costs have been considerable.
I then proceed in chapter 5 to detail the politics of cotton when it falls into company hands. To do so, that chapter elaborates a range of scandals linked to the financialized fiber and details the emerging political contest over standards that aim to make cotton companies more “responsible” and “sustainable.” I assess the legitimacy of financial cotton and physical cotton, and argue that there is a considerable risk that financialized business-as-usual might soon become cloaked in the language of “better” cotton. In chapter 6, I briefly offer my concluding perspective on what all of the geopolitics covered in the book means for sustainable development and for change in the world cotton order. Finally, after the conclusion, I present a humble anthropological account of my situation in relation to this fiber in the Afterword. This reflection or personal tale imparts a final piece of the geopolitical puzzle: the political orientation and engagements of this particular analyst with cotton and the world cotton order.
Notes
1
. Jeff Ballinger, “How Civil Society Can Help: Sweatshop Workers as Globalization’s Consequence,”
Harvard International Review
, Summer 2011: 54–9.
2
. Koray Çalişkan,
Market Threads: How Cotton Farmers and Traders Create a Global Economy
(Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2010).
3
. Giorgio Riello,
Cotton: The Fabric that Made the Modern World
(Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2013).
4
