After Brazil another major cotton exporting country has made arrangements to provide quality data on cotton traceability for the foreign buyers. This would give their buyers the confidence to export cotton products to developed economies.
Cotton Australia, an organisation representing Australian cotton growers, has launched an online dashboard to improve the quality of data for cotton grown in the country and bring more transparency to the market.
Key metrics will be made available to users, such as water use efficiency and pesticide use, uptake of minimum tillage and integrated pest management, the major markets for Australian cotton and the amount of sustainably certified cotton grown each year.
The project coordinator Brooke Summers for this purpose said access to accurate, current data has become a critical requirement of the cotton supply chain, particularly with a renewed focus on due diligence, greenwashing and on-product claims.She said Australia’s cotton growers collect a huge amount of data on their farms, as well as contributing to the collection of industry-wide data via a compulsory research and development levy on every bale of cotton they grow.
Information drawn from Australian cotton industry research and survey data along with government and publicly available sources will also be incorporated in the data. The information provided will havesome 70 datasets spanning production, yield, quality, export along with progress towards social and environmental sustainability targets.
Cotton Research and Development Corporation, the Australian Cotton Shippers Association, International Cotton Advisory Committee, Cotton Seed Distributors and Bayer CropScience are included in Australian Cotton Data Dashboard. The project is being funded by Australian Government’s Agricultural Trade and Market Access Cooperation (ATMAC) programme.
