ICAC Efforts to Promote Global Cotton Consumption

As the only United Nations-recognized intergovernmental commodity body representing cotton, the ICAC plays a central role in the global promotion of cotton. It is the world’s most important natural fiber for a host of reasons:

It provides income to farmers in more than 80 countries around the world,
It’s one of the few agricultural commodities that provides both fibre and food (for both humans and livestock),
It’s natural and biodegrades quickly compared with synthetic alternatives, and
It thrives in hot, arid regions where few other crops could grow.

While there are countless examples of the benefits cotton provides, the ICAC focusses its promotion efforts on several high-visibility initiatives: World Cotton Day, the #TruthAboutCotton initiative, The Book of Cotton, and A World Without Cotton.

World Cotton Day

World Cotton Day (recognized annually on October 7) was launched in 2019 at World Trade Organization headquarters, where more than 700 people gathered for the inaugural celebration. In August 2021 — less than two years after it was launched — the United Nations reserved October 7 as World Cotton Day on its permanent calendar, as recognition of cotton’s status as a global good. The conference has been held every year since the inaugural event in 2019, with the 2024 event in Cotonou, Benin, registering multiple “firsts”:

First time the conference was held in a country rather than at an international organization,
First time it was held in the Global South, and
First time World Cotton Day activities were held on multiple days (business forum and industrial park visit on October 8).

To see what types of events have been held around the world on October 7, please visit www.worldcottonday.com.

#TruthAboutCotton

This media-focused initiative, launched in 2018, was created to combat the mistakes, myths, and outright lies that have plagued the cotton industry in recent years. Whether it’s through ignorance or intent, these mistruths do untold damage to cotton’s reputation — and even hurt demand for cotton — so the ICAC developed this science-based project to set the record straight, once and for all. Entries are posted every #TruthTuesday on Twitter and LinkedIn.

The Book of Cotton (Coming Soon)

Cotton provides the world with so many benefits that it’s sometimes hard to understand all that it does for us on a daily basis — so the ICAC is compiling those benefits into chapters in its forthcoming Book of Cotton. It will be a clear and concise publication that highlights the many advantages cotton provides to people across the globe.

The chapters being written now cover:

Biodegradability,
Water consumption,
Soil rejuvenation,
Consumer preferences, and more.

Additional chapters will be added over time to this living, evolving document over time, including pesticide and fertilizer usage, by-products, medical applications, and more.

A World Without Cotton (Coming Soon)

This video project is aligned with the Book of Cotton, which highlights all of cotton’s benefits. In A World Without Cotton, you will see and hear from people from all over the world who rely on the cotton textile value chain to feed their families and send their children to school. It will provide a grim, stark reality of what things would be like without the world’s most important natural fiber — more poverty, more climate change, more environmental damage, and other disastrous developments.