Better Cotton

In 2019, the Better Cotton Initiative officially celebrated its 10th anniversary. To mark this special year, we launched a digital timeline which explores BCI’s first decade, celebrating the milestones that enabled BCI to evolve into the largest cotton sustainability programme in the world. Click the image below to explore the timeline.

BCI enters its expansion phase and focuses efforts on growing Better Cotton supply and demand. BCI aims to bring more members onboard, while training more cotton farmers on sustainable growing practices. The first harvests of Better Cotton take place in Tajikistan, Turkey and Mozambique. The Better Cotton Tracer (later renamed as the Better Cotton Platform) is launched as an online tracking system for BCI Members to record all transactions of Better Cotton Claims Units, or ‘credits’, across the supply chain. This is the first such system anywhere in the world, tracking a commodity right through the value chain. Aid by Trade Foundation’s Cotton Made in Africa (CmiA) standard (multiple African countries) is benchmarked with the Better Cotton Standard, aligning the two standards means that farmers producing cotton in line with the CmiA standard can also sell their cotton as Better Cotton, helping to increase the global supply of Better Cotton.