trehsu

Ohh yeah. This is just a guess but I'm guessing really mediocre grade cotton, when unbleached is probably stronger than super long and strong cotton once it's been bleached. I guess if you really want strong and white cotton Zimbabwean is probably good because it's lustrous and long but I personally don't care about how white my cotton is for denim. Maybe for shirts and stuff I could understand wanting super light bleached cotton but for denim their dark anyway. I just want them super strong.

Yeah I think all of that is true about true flax plant linen. I wonder if it would be logical to make a cotton blend with linen for denim. It's usually in really light weight fabric so I wonder if flax plant fiber is more expensive. I would probably make a good summer weight denim mix.

I mean you could say that the burden is on the mills but I think it's also on N&F if they are customers of the mill's just like it is on us. I understand completely that there is so much secrecy about sourcing products and manufacturing that it's really discouraging to try to find these thing's out yourself. Lot's of denim companies, however, are much more open than other's about these things and when there not open to their sourcing it only arouses suspicion.

An example of a better acting company is Levis. Now they source cotton from perhaps dozens or countries and their mills and manufacuring takes place in dozens of countries so it's hard to be positive that there are no human rights violation that's going on. They are, however, much more open to the public about their factory's labor practices (maybe because they are just so big that they are right out in the public's eye). Still, they appear to completely comply with international trade regulations. Most companies, most likely out of fear of negative publicity rather than ethical concern, steer clear of areas of known conflict. Areas such as Uzbekistan and Zimbabwe for example in the cotton industry. Most Levis jeans are produced in latin america (many mexico or surrounding centeral american nations) (some china and southern asian countries). They buy a lot of cotton from the US, Mexico and China (probably because these are some of the largest producing nations). Levis isn't an absolute moral or ethical company but out of fear of negative pr (as a result of consumers talking about stuff like we are now) they steer clear of places in the world where human rights, pricing and sourcing are kept secret.

Ohh and as far as organic, I'm not sure weather I'm a prominent for it or not. Is is more environmentally friendly but if these farmers that are relying on cotton as a means to survive are getting a much lower yeild per acre by growing organic, I don't think organic is financially better for them. Then again, organic cotton, even if you aren't able to produce as much of it per acre, can fetch a higher price at market and can therefore perhaps be beneficial. The only problem with this logic in Africa, particularly Zimbabwe, is that in order to have your cotton be internationally recognized as organic it has to be certified by an international third party organisation. Getting certified organic is expensive, time consuming and very difficult, especially when these small scale farmers don't even know how to go about the process of becoming certified. I therefore would believe that very few small scale farmers are certified organic, and it's more likely only the large scale farms in the area that are certified. I believe actually the united states would have a much greater percentage of cotton farmers being recognized as farming organic than if Zimbabwe, even though almost everybody in Zimbabwe is farming organic. It's not because they want to it's because they don't have access to pesticides and fertilizer, ect.

I'm actually doing my thesis paper on this at the University of Maryland Baltimore County. Specifically it's on analyzing various cotton growing techniques and economic policies for Africa as a means of development.

I don't specifically know that Zimbabwean cotton is that much better than any other cotton. Perhaps there is a difference in illustriousness and length and strength but I imagine this is negligible, especially when you consider that over 200 million tons of cotton are produced in Zimbabwe each year, there's bound to be a great variance in quality. Within Harare's cotton trading organizations farmers' cotton are given different grades of quality and given different prices based on that grading system (this is sometimes a fair grading system and sometimes not)(grading is often based on average length of the fiber more than any other factors). Anyway my point is that PRPS, Momotaro, Kicking Mule and others probably do source better cotton, probably very high grade cotton in Zimbabwe, which on average probably has a marginally higher median grade of cotton as a whole. But still, I at least feel that the only reason why they boast about this is to try to justify their prices by saying that you are getting the very best possible, when really the very best possible when in reality this cotton is about 1% stronger or something like that.

As far as human rights issues, it's incredibly difficult to understand. My belief is this. Because cotton is a cash crop many farmers, if they choose, should grow and sell it and it's a viable way out of poverty. And if that's the case than PRPS, Momotaro and Kicking Mule might in fact be contributing to the growth of Zimbabwe's agricultural sector by buying Zimbabwean instead of say American. But how can we know? Do the farmers get a fair price or not. I've emailed both Momotaro and Naked and Famous and commented on their Facebook pages asking them question about how they source their Zimbabwean cotton(through what cotton ginning company or what location in the country, ect...). Momotaro replied saying that they couldn't release any information about where they source it from while Naked and Famous flat out never responded to me and ended up deleting my facebook comment on their page. I later commented again pointing out that they had ignored me and removed my comment even though I wan't being offensive and they deleted that comment as well.

They don't want you to know where they source, not necessarily even because they source from illegitimate places but because they themselves are ignorant to the situation in Zimbabwe and they themselves don't know if their buying cotton from these places(ginneries/cotton tradeing companies) is beneficial or harmful to the smallholder farmers.