Cotton with human warmth: genuine relations between farmers and fashion
Mahiya Mboje, cotton farmer from the village Kabondo in Tanzania in conversation with Marco Paul, Co-CEO bioRe® Tanzania Ltd. during the cotton buying season.
“Today morning I received a call from one of our farmers, Mr Mahiya Mboje from Kabondo village. After greetings he asked me two questions!
He said ‘Marco, we are going through big crisis of corona virus all over the world, and bad enough the virus has affected most of European countries, my question is, are the buyers in Switzerland who buy our cotton all safe?’
Second question: ‘corona virus has affected economy of many countries in the world, including Switzerland, so will they manage to buy all of our cotton this season?’
I found this farmer’s concern simply amazing, and I replied that our partners in Switzerland are all safe, that no one has reported sick, and that all measures are being taken to meet the purchase guarantee to buy your cotton”.
In a globalised textile fast fashion world, where the “raw material” cotton is anonymously speculated on the world stock exchange without any obligation on the part of the consumers, and where textiles are created without relationships and without consideration for the people in the textile chain, this dialogue is indeed an amazing example of a real relationship between farmer and fashion!
The buyer of the cotton in Switzerland is Remei AG. Remei produces textile collections made of cotton on behalf of B2B customers and follows the economically constructive approach of All-Holder-Value, a different type of doing business that creates value for all those involved in the production process. Committed to the bioRe® standards, Remei produces according to the highest social and ecological requirements in a completely transparent textile chain from seed to finished textile.
Together with its B2B partners Remei is driving forward system change in the textile trade.
