Better Cotton is the world’s leading sustainability initiative for cotton. Our mission is to help cotton communities survive and thrive, while protecting and restoring the environment.
In just over 10 years we have become the world’s largest cotton sustainability programme. Our mission: to help cotton communities survive and thrive, while protecting and restoring the environment.
Better Cotton is grown in 22 countries around the world and accounts for 22% of global cotton production. In the 2022-23 cotton season, 2.13 million licensed Better Cotton Farmers grew 5.47 million tonnes of Better Cotton.
Today Better Cotton has more than 2,700 members, reflecting the breadth and diversity of the industry. Members of a global community that understands the mutual benefits of sustainable cotton farming. The moment you join, you become part of this too.
The founding premise of Better Cotton is that a healthy sustainable future for cotton and the people that farm it is in the interests of everyone connected with it.
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The 2025 annual conference of Better Cotton marked a new phase for the organisation, with the introduction of its new CEO, the announcement that it will become a regenerative standard, and the initial snapshot of its first US Impact Report.
Better Cotton has announced that it will become a regenerative standard within the next year, further strengthening its ongoing commitment to protect and restore the environment and improve conditions for cotton farming communities around the world.
Better Cotton has announced Nick Weatherill, former Executive Director of the International Cocoa Initiative (ICI), as its new Chief Executive Officer.
Ali Ertuğrul, from USB Certification, at the Better Cotton Conference in İzmir (Credit: Better Cotton Initiative)
Ali Ertuğrul, Technical and Quality Manager at USB Certification
I’m an environmental engineer, so sustainability is at my heart. As the technical and quality manager for textile and recycling certification departments at USB Certification, I make sure the programme requirements, including those with Better Cotton, are implemented correctly.
This year, we started working in Pakistan with farm-level certification for Better Cotton, something which has been pretty exciting for us. Even though we had done farm certification before, in other countries, this is quite special – and we believe that sustainable production practices will flourish there.
The working models, especially in supply chains, are quite different from country to country. You can have bigger production areas in certain countries, like Bangladesh, or you can have a network of suppliers and subcontractors working together, as in Turkey. So, while we are doing certification, we are also guiding them towards achieving their goals in traceability, to ensure their compliance against the requirements.
Data and collective work
The biggest risk in the sustainability sector right now is greenwashing. There’s nowhere to go if we cannot back up our claims with data, with actual, factual, and verified data. But we also have to propagate that data throughout the supply chain.
In order to be able to do that, you need a technological infrastructure to ensure traceability from the extraction of the raw material – or production of the raw material – all the way to the labels, on the consumer facing product itself.
You cannot do it without data, you cannot do it without assurance, and you definitely cannot do it without in a technological infrastructure.
Different stakeholders need to work together to reach sustainability goals. First of all, we need programme ownership, assurance provider, and certification. We are part of a triangle which are interacting with the other two areas.
Programme owners set the requirements, the criteria, for the compliance of certified entities. They also assign assurance providers, so they can actually verify the system of a certification body, not only monitoring the outcome of the work that the certification bodies are doing. They also make sure the certification bodies have a mature, competent system capable of assessing the requirements of the standard – in the audit and the certification process.
Eyes on the ground
There is another responsibility: we are the eyes on the ground. If we see any deviations, if there’s any ground reality that is deviating from the standard requirements, it’s our responsibility to have that communicated to the programme owners. It is part of the monitoring, evaluationand learning cycle.
As a programme owner, Better Cotton is heavily involved with the implementation of the standard itself, through their implementation partners all over the world. That means, it also gives the standard a localised context. In that sense, it was actually good to witness such a nuanced approach to standard requirements.
With the new certification paradigm that has come up, the collaboration between the program owner and the certification body, like USB Certification, will be tighter in the coming years, thanks to the level of assurance. The level of data collaboration will increase.
Hearing from farmers
At this year’s Better Cotton Conference, the sessions brought some provocative questions into the spotlight, which I quite enjoyed. Also, this year’s conference’s motto was ‘It Starts with Farmers’, and it is always good to hear the opinions of farmers.
Another thing I enjoyed was the networking. The participants were not passively listening to the sessions, they were engaging in conversations with different kinds of stakeholders at the same time. I would say the conference has moved the mission forward.
This is an important event, as it is a hub and a ground, a chance to bring all different stakeholders into the same place. Also, a chance to reiterate what I said before, that this is a dialogue, this is a conversation. It’s also an ever-changing landscape, the market for sustainability and sustainable certification is rapidly changing. So, without engaging in meaningful conversations, we cannot do it.
This is one of the missions of Better Cotton as well, and one of the missions of this year’s conference.
Woman working at a cotton field in Uzbekistan. Photo credit: Uzbekistan’s Ministry of Agriculture
Better Cotton, the world’s largest cotton sustainability initiative, has announced significant progress in the delivery of its Uzbekistan programme, including the adoption of stronger and more refined approaches to due diligence and decent work activities.
Katerina Gorbunova, Head of Better Cotton’s programme in Uzbekistan, said: “In collaboration with our Programme Partner, the German Agency for International Cooperation (GIZ), we have strengthened the programme’s framework and the services we offer to accelerate change across the country’s cotton sector.”
Better Cotton’s Uzbek programme has strengthened in-country verification of licensed clusters by building the capacity of independent civil society groups and third-party auditors, plus implementing an updated due diligence methodology to ensure more robust and local oversight.
This new-and-improved approach includes in-depth interviews and questionnaires with both cluster management and workers. It also consists of checks on financial health, ethics, and governance, providing a more comprehensive view of risk and performance across participating enterprises. The insights generated through this process are used to inform targeted interventions.
Decent work-related actions have also evolved in light of Better Cotton recently becoming a certification scheme. The organisation now conducts preliminary assessments of newly onboarded clusters before the season begins to determine their readiness for certification and if requirements are not met, audits are postponed to the following season.
For clusters with active licences, second party checks by qualified Better Cotton staff are conducted to identify potential decent work-related issues and, if necessary, trigger a more comprehensive examination by external labour rights monitoring organisations.
Since August 2024, Better Cotton and GIZ have expanded training to cover not only innovative and regenerative agricultural practices, but also social sustainability and decent work principles following recent changes to Uzbek labour laws.
This effort deployed a cascading training methodology to target cotton cluster management on the basis that they can subsequently educate workers, who can then support their peers.
Gorbunova said: “The Uzbek cotton sector has tremendous potential to be a leader in the production of more sustainably produced cotton. This can only be achieved through collaboration, robust and transparent processes, and perseverance. Better Cotton is uniquely positioned to help unlock this potential and will continue to engage stakeholders across the country to make our vision a reality.”
Paul Schumacher, Cotton Project Manager at GIZ Uzbekistan, added: “Today, sustainable agricultural methods, trade facilitations and decent work are no longer parallel efforts, they are parts of one sustainable system. With the right networks and shared effort, as we created within the frame of Better Cotton, we turn individual action into systemic change.”
Notes to Editors
Better Cotton Programme Partners work with farming communities at field level to ensure they are producing cotton that meets the Better Cotton Standard.
Uzbekistan’s ‘cotton clusters’ are private companies with vertically-integrated production capacities that are awarded land grants on the condition that it is used to produce and process cotton.
Clusters employ thousands of workers, meaning that a top-down training approach can streamline onboarding and boost staff autonomy.
Uzbekistan is the sixth largest cotton-producing country in the world.
Better Cotton completed its transition to become a certification scheme in February 2025. As such, third-party bodies will fulfil decent work monitoring as part of their auditing requirements, supplemented by remaining Better Cotton second-party checks.
A key cotton-producing country with a strong track record of innovation and sustainability in agriculture, Australia is the latest step in our traceability journey.
Better Cotton will welcome cotton farmers, retailers, brands, environmental activists, and innovators to its annual conference, which takes place in İzmir, Türkiye, on 18-19 June.
Do you want to know what the largest cotton sustainability programme in the world is up to? Keep up to date with the latest developments and hear from BCI Farmers, Partners and Members in the new BCI Quarterly Newsletter. BCI Members also receive a Monthly Member Update.
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These updates are intended to reflect changes to the Better Cotton Platform’s default sharing settings and data use in our Audit management system.
You don’t need to do anything to accept these changes – they’re effective from today, 2 April 2025.
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