Between 2020 and 2021 quite a few fashion companies issued statements about their concerns regarding the use of cotton from China's Xinjiang province and vowed to no longer use it. Members of the Better Cotton Initiative (BCI), the group promoting sustainable cotton production, announced last year they were suspending their approval of cotton sourced from Xinjiang, mentioning concerns about human rights. Previously, human rights groups and activists and United Nations rights experts accused indeed China of using mass detention camps, forced labor and sterilization of women, on Uyghurs in Xinjiang.
The Chinese government repeatedly rejected accusations that it is holding Uyghurs in internment camps in Xinjiang (it is estimated that, since 2017, Chinese authorities detained as many as one million Uyghurs, subjecting them to forced labour), stating that the camps are education and training centres designed to fight extremism.
Last year many Western brands and fashion houses (many of them members of the BCI), including H&M, Nike, Uniqlo, Adidas, New Balance, and Burberry, were removed from Chinese e-commerce platforms and apps. The backlash against these companies at the time wasn't probably triggered by their statements about imports coming from the Xinjiang Uygur Autonomous Region (XUAR), but were probably linked with the US-China tensions.
In July 2020, the US government issued an advisory to warn businesses about forced labor in Xinjiang; then, in December of the same year, the U.S. Department of Homeland Security announced that, with a "Withhold Release Order", the U.S. Customs and Border Protection (CBP) personnel at all U.S. ports of entry would detain shipments containing cotton and cotton products originating from the Xinjiang Production and Construction Corps (XPCC) and its subordinate and affiliated entities, as well as any products made in whole or in part with or derived from that cotton, such as apparel, garments, and textiles.
In March last year, the US, Canada, the UK and the European Union placed new sanctions on Chinese officials over alleged human rights abuses in Xinjiang. China issued its own measures then, sanctioning European lawmakers and institutions, so the backlash against the apparel and fashion companies last March may have been the consequence of the current relationships between these entitles and China. But there are new developments about this story.
At the beginning of May this year, researchers at the Agroisolab in Jülich and the Hochschule Niederrhein University of Applied Sciences (both in Germany), announced that an isotope analysis found traces of Xinjiang cotton in garments by Puma, Adidas, Hugo Boss, German outdoor wear brand Jack Wolfskin, and fashion company Tom Tailor.
The isotope analysis is a test employed by archaeologists or forensic scientists for a series of applications, including reconstructing past environmental and climatic conditions, and a variety of other physical, geological, palaeontological and chemical processes, such as tracing the geographic origin of organic or non-organic substances.
The findings contradicted the brands' promises not to use supply chains that may have employed forced labour, but also made ordinary consumers realise that, for brands and groups, vowing not to use cotton from China's Xinjiang is easier said than done. It is indeed estimated that, while 20% of the world's cotton comes from China, 84% of that comes from Xinjiang and it remains difficult, or even impossible, for companies to be 100% sure about the source of their cotton for different reasons. Access to their own supply chains in China is indeed complex and restricted by the communist government of Xi Jinping, besides Xinjiang cotton is widely employed and often mixed with cotton from other places, so tracing the provenance and providing evidence may once again be extremely difficult.
Things may become a bit more complex now, though, as the Uyghur Forced Labor Prevention Act (UFLPA), a ban on cotton from forced Uyghur labour (cotton is labelled as a "high priority for enforcement" in the act, along with a wide range of products such as tomatoes and the polysilicon found in solar panels, all of them widely produced in Xinjiang), comes into force from today in the US. The wider-reaching UFLPA was approved by the Senate last July, and Congress in December. It was subsequently signed into law by current US President Joe Biden.
So, from today, under the UFLPA, US Customs and Border Protection officials will block or seize all shipments of products partly or wholly made in Xinjiang that arrive at American ports, unless the companies involved provide the relevant certification to avoid fines of up to $250,000.
"Today is an important day in the fight to stand up against the Chinese Communist Party's genocide and forced labor of Uyghurs and predominantly Muslim ethnic groups in the Xinjiang Uyghur Autonomous Region (XUAR)," US Republican Senator Marco Rubio, Democrat Senator Jeff Merkley and two other lawmakers stated in an official note.
"The United States is sending a clear message that we will no longer remain complicit in the Chinese Communist Party's use of slave labor and egregious crimes against humanity. From now on, entities both inside and outside the XUAR who seek to import to the U.S. must show that no part of their product was manufactured using slave labor." There is actually a bit of concern about the act as some U.S. businesses claim the federal government hasn't provided sufficient guidance on steps to avoid having imports seized at the U.S. border. Yet the U.S. actually provided some instructions to importers about how to provide the evidence and, a week ago, the U.S. Customs and Border Protection Service (CBP) issued a 17-page document with guidelines.
Concerns remain, though, about the businesses that may either stop exporting goods to the US in order to avoid having their goods seized, and start exporting to other countries garments made with Xinjiang's cotton. It is only natural to wonder when and if, at some point, the EU will also launch a plan against forced labour that may have an impact not just on fashion, but on the exploited migrant workers picking fruit and vegetables (tomatoes in particular) in Italy.
But, while we wait to see what the European Union will do after the Uyghur Forced Labor Prevention Act (UFLPA), how will fashion companies manage to prove the source of their cotton? Well, some of them plan to use the blockchain and artificial intelligence to trace supply chains. Yet there are some disadvantages about the blockchain, including the fact that it consumes too much energy, and its implementation is a costly process. Besides, it can be complex, inefficient and harder to scale, it can be slow when there are too many users on the network and, last but not least, the data on the blockchain is immutable.
It will be interesting to see how companies in the fashion industry will react to the UFLPA in the next few months: so far, quite a few of them pretended, denied or simply lied about a variety of issues of concern for consumers such as sustainability, traceability and forced labour. There is an increased demand for transparent supply chains and, who knows, maybe the Uyghur Forced Labor Prevention Act will finally manage to improve transparency at least for what regards forced labour.
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