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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Better Cotton will today conclude its annual Programme Partner Meeting in Penang, Malaysia.
The event brought together over 100 participants from its global network to spotlight innovations, share learnings, and reflect on successes and challenges across the cotton sector.
The three-day event underscored Better Cotton’s role as a convenor of the global cotton community, providing a platform for organisations to meet their peers and hear updates on key workstreams driving Better Cotton’s evolution.
Our Programme Partner Meeting is always an incredibly valuable occasion, allowing us to interact with our global community, define priorities for the future, and support one another. Better Cotton’s success is testament to the expertise, hard-work and dedication of our farmer-focused collaborators who make this initiative what it is.
Lena Staafgard, Chief Operating Officer at Better Cotton
Alongside sessions that explored social and environmental impact areas from biodiversity to livelihoods, an Innovations Marketplace was held to create space for organisations to showcase their latest solutions and best practices.
Better Cotton also presented the Producer Unit Manager (PUM) of the Year Award to individuals that demonstrated outstanding performance in the field, working alongside farmers and workers to enable them to adopt more sustainable cotton farming practices.
Mariam Ashraf, Producer Unit Manager at REEDS Pakistan, and a recipient of the award, commented:
It’s been a great opportunity for me to hear from different cultures and countries about the practices they are using, and think about what I can use in my farming community to make livelihoods better.
Mariam Ashraf, Producer Unit Manager at REEDS Pakistan
Other recipients included: Özlem Öz Ergün (Agrita, Turkiye), Li Zhi Zhen (Konglong, China), Mamadou B. Dembele (CMDT, Mali), Catija Jamal (SAN-JFS, Mozambique) and Varna Sindhu (WWF TL, India).
Over the three days, Better Cotton staff presented a number of key updates to ensure continued alignment with the organisation’s partner network. Topics included Better Cotton Certification, the Principles & Criteria Version 3.0, the use of impact data, safeguarding, and grievance mechanisms to ensure decent work.
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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.
You can read the full text by visiting our Data Privacy Policy page.
