Consequence of non-comprehensive approach to organic cotton production
The cotton standard GOTS found evidence of “systematic fraud” and abuse of the Indian government’s certification system of organic cotton production, Apparel Insider reports. GOTS claims to have uncovered 20,000 metric tons of fake organic cotton following a local investigation.
The fraud included fake Raw Cotton Transaction Certificates (TCs) which had been created using APEDA (Agricultural and Processed Food Products Export Development Authority of the Indian Government) templates with fake QR codes which led to a cloned APEDA website to pretend the TCs were authentic.
An urge on investigation, criminal prosecution and improvement has now been triggered by GOTS.
«It was a question of time until this fact would pop up», says Patrick Hohmann , who initiated the research process with the aim of GMO free cotton production in India years ago. «This aim is possible, but not easy to reach», so Hohmann: «It needs consequence in organic agriculture and GMO free seeds. Both are not evident in India. bioRe has put so much effort for the past 10 years in seed research that today it has reached a promising level: GMO free cotton production with less than 0.9% GMO contamination is possible.»
The bioRe® Foundation is supporting farmers in India and Tanzania through training and research in organic agriculture to grow organic cotton successfully. Promoting and monitoring the organic farming and sourcing the right seeds is crucial support at the beginning of the production chain in order to enable compliance. The bioRe® Foundation monitors compliance with standards by means of independent external institutes .
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Staying informed and aware of who manufactered your products in which region and in which conditions
Remei AG is the exclusive licensee of the bioRe® brand, trades with the organic cotton and provides retailers with the quality labels bioRe® Sustainable Textiles and bioRe® Sustainable Cotton . With the help of the Traceability Tool each piece of clothing with bioRe label is traceable back to farmers. With its fully transparent supply chain Remei enables an all-encompassing quality-assurance.
