Sourcery Stories: How To Create Tangible Impact for Cotton Growers
Ruchita Chhabra, Grower Engagement Director of Sourcery, manages sustainable cotton sourcing programs and implements the Direct-to-Grower™ Programme in India. She collaborates with various stakeholders on the ground who work tirelessly to make a tangible impact on cotton farmers and their communities.
With rich experience in managing and monitoring sustainable cotton programs like Organic, BCI, and REEL (PSCP) with organisations like CottonConnect and Organic Cotton Accelerator and sourcing experience from global buying houses like Li & Fung, Impulse and others, Ruchita steers the leading grower organisations under the Direct-to-Grower™ Programme who are committed to commercial and environmental excellence.
"By engaging with cotton farmers, I gained rich experience in the last leg of the supply chain, or rather the first leg of the supply chain, up close and personal. My perception of the supply chain expanded from “fibre-to-fashion” to “farm-to-fashion”."
Read the interview to learn more about Ruchita’s work at Sourcery and within its Direct-to-Grower™ Programme, developing SOPs and processes, keeping in mind practical challenges faced on the ground by our grower partners and best practices that the industry needs.
What underlying obstacles have impeded cotton farmers’ progress and tangible impact on the ground?
Simply expressing the desire to use “more sustainable cotton” is insufficient. In recent years, brands and other partners have announced their goals to source more sustainable cotton, which is significant progress from where we were ten years ago. However, it has become synonymous with chasing paper trails or claim units.
And that’s certainly not enough to bring real change on the ground. We must support our commitments with robust action plans and a changed approach. One way to do this is using a new system called Direct-to-Grower™. With this approach, we engage directly with the cotton farmers themselves to ensure sustainability, transcending the mere acquisition of certificates.
Instead, it involves a genuine shift in our business approach, ultimately leading to tangible improvements at the ground level.
To secure the long-term resilience of the cotton sector, brands must be more involved, sharing risks and rewards with growers and fibre producers.
What are the challenges cotton farmers face?
Cotton farming communities are facing several challenges, both social and environmental. These challenges make it difficult to sustain cotton production in the long term. At the same time, brands and retailers are under increasing pressure from consumers and legislation to source their cotton more ethically. To meet this demand, it is essential to reimagine the future of supply chains and ensure that cotton production is sustainable, traceable, and transparent.
"At the heart of this transformation are the farmers—the stewards of the land and the driving force for change. By supporting the farmers, we strengthen the entire sector and ensure the well-being of our planet."
My focus lies in pinpointing the underlying obstacles that impede the growth of the organic cotton supply, such as the scarcity of organic cotton seeds, inadequate guarantees of an organic premium from buyers, limited access of farmers to the organic premium, and delayed cotton projections.
How can we solve these challenges?
Addressing these challenges is a complex endeavour requiring numerous stakeholders’ collective effort. Recent events like the COVID-19 pandemic have amplified these obstacles and sparked a greater awareness of the planet’s preservation and connection to humanity’s well-being.
"Together, we must persistently work towards finding solutions and safeguarding our future."
Sourcery advocates for treating farmers as businesspeople who make decisions based on what’s best for their livelihoods, employees, themselves, and the planet. Regardless of their income level, farmers are running businesses, and it’s essential to acknowledge and respect their perspective. Sourcery aims to make a compelling business case to farmers to encourage sustainable practices.
Because we believe sustainability is a natural by-product or output of better business and trade.
What does this look like under the Direct-to-Grower™ Programme?
We facilitate formations of vertical coalitions, which include brands, farm groups, spinners, fabric mills, garment manufacturers, and everybody along the chain, through forming agreements called fibre commitments (at the farm level) and product commitments (at the product level). That then allows for pre-set definitions of the objectives of the purchase and what the ultimate purchase will be and then allows purchase order sequence as it usually does today.
Vertical Coalitions
The fibre commitment agreement is one of this programme's most crucial building blocks. We bring together multiple stakeholders on the same platform and have several discussions with them to help them arrive at mutual agreements on fibre specs, quality parameters, delivery lead times, payment terms and modes, and all other crucial points. Once this is accomplished, the suppliers can relax as they have established all the important commercial and technical issues of securing the fibre well in advance. There is little uncertainty (weather, crop failure, etc., market dynamics).
2. Traceability & Primary Impact Data
Through our grower programme management, we ensure clear and detailed information about cotton fibre's origin, production, and transportation. Under our programme, each farmer and their respective farms are mapped with their GPS codes. We collect 350 verified data points per grower, not just from a cohort but from every grower who enrols in our programme, to get a sense of their status quo and assess their existing practices around soil fertility, farming practices, and energy consumption at farming and ginning stages. We also look over the existing package of practices, organisational structure and other vital details of the grower partner organisation and, accordingly, we provide recommendations to fill the identified gaps.
3. Transparency
We offer several assurance services to address subjects like product quality, genetic verification of the fibre, and tracking fibre movement via chain of custody management. Very often, we hear that the organic cotton premium is usually absorbed within the supply chain and hardly reaches the ground level. The farmer, who has probably gone through a drop in his yield because of switching from conventional farming to sustainable farming, has invested more than any other supply chain partner. So, we also provide assurance services for that because integrity is critical for building trust and maintaining strong relationships between buyers and sellers.
Can you give us an example of a project that had a tangible impact?
One of our notable achievements from the past year is our role as on-site project managers for the Good Earth Cotton® Program in Madhya Pradesh (MP). In this program, we collaborated with approximately 2,000 farmers, overseeing training and data collection and developing essential Standard Operating Procedures (SOPs) during its inaugural year. This was an exceptionally exciting endeavour for us.
Furthermore, we have been engaged in collaborative efforts with the agricultural organisation on various other initiatives. Through these collaborations, we have established effective frameworks, creating hubs for Indian cotton to thrive on a global scale, contributing to the overall success of Indian textile fibre production.
What are you most excited about what’s to come for the Direct-to-Grower™ Programme?
The draft European Supply Chain Act requires EU companies to carefully manage social and environmental impacts along their entire value chain, including direct and indirect suppliers, their own operations, and products and services. We’re working very hard on our app to enable farm digitisation with Bluenumber, which will help to identify the challenges, work towards improvement, and thus ensure the responsible sourcing of materials, fair labour practices, and the use of sustainable production methods, a basis on which accountable claims can be made!
