Ask where cotton comes from and you can really get in a tangle. For a start, Egyptian cotton doesn’t necessarily come from Egypt. The word “Egyptian” on a label can allude to the cultivated variety of the cotton plant, or where it is grown: India, for example, exports Egyptian Giza cotton. This variety, like American Pima, is an extra-long staple (ELS) cotton: its fibres are longer, so cloth made from it is smoother and less likely to pill. And in the past people paid a premium for cotton from Egypt because its climate was perfect for growing ELS cotton.
Before you rush to the shops, wallet agape, consider cotton’s humanitarian and ecological price-tag. Cotton farmers from America to China use particularly noxious pesticides, spending around $2 billion on them each year. Unicef estimates that 1m children are hired seasonally to bring in Egypt’s cotton crop, and child labour has been reported on cotton farms in Africa, India, China and Uzbekistan. Unfortunately little is done to protect consumers from buying products tended and harvested in miserable conditions. At the London department store John Lewis, the sales assistant could tell me nothing about where a £150, Egyptian, 1,000-thread-count duvet cover came from; the packet said “Made in Romania”....
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