T-shirt Linked to Slavery

[kabustyleeさん]

Is Your T-shirt Linked to Slavery? Soon You May Be Able to Tell

Shoppers lured by a bargain-priced T-shirt but concerned about whether the
item is free of slave labor could soon have the answer - from DNA forensic
technology. James Hayward, chief executive of U.S.-based Applied DNA Sciences
Inc. that develops DNA-based technology to prevent counterfeiting and ensure
authenticity, said his researchers have been working in the cotton industry for
up to nine years.

Hayward said this was prompted by rising concerns about the global cotton
industry, that provides income for more than 250 million people, using child and
slave labor in harvesting the crop and the during the production process to make
clothes. He noted that cotton was one of the most complex supply chains he had
come across because it was grown in more than 100 countries and goes through a
multi-stage transformation process before emerging in "fast fashion" that is
cheap and disposable.

"Often each country (is) performing a single function in the transformation
of a mature cotton fiber, a single cell into a finished product like a cotton
shirt. Along the way there are many opportunities for cheating," said Hayward.
"Our primary aim is to cleanse the cotton supply chain and by that, I mean
eliminating any diversion, any mislabeling, any counterfeiting that can take
place throughout the cotton supply chain," he told the Thomson Reuters
Foundation.

Hayward said an ideal way to ascertain the true identity of a natural
commodity was to use the DNA that nature gave that commodity or to mark it with
a manufactured DNA. This could allow the cotton can be traced to where it was
picked before it went into the ginning process that cleans away seed and other
debris for packaging into bails to ship around the world for spinning, dyeing
and to make into clothes.

ORIGINS TRACED

During this process mislabeling can happen and substitute fibers added to
cotton, with retailers and governments increasingly aware of this. Hayward said
a key issue is where the substitute fibers originate from as some countries have
used state-sponsored slavery to collect that cotton.

Modern slavery has become a catch-all term to describe human trafficking,
forced labor, debt bondage, sex trafficking, forced marriage and other
slave-like exploitation. An estimated 46 million people are living as slaves,
according the 2016 Global Slavery Index by the Walk Free Foundation, which said
Uzbekistan - the world's fifth-largest cotton exporter - Turkmenistan and
Tajikistan were forcing people to work in the annual cotton harvest.

Over 264 brands have signed up to a global pledge set up by the Responsible
Sourcing Network (RSN), run by the California-based charity As You Sow, vowing
not to use Uzbek cotton until the government stops using forced child and adult
labor.

"I think many consumers would be appalled to contemplate the notion that
their garment they're wearing could be the product of human trafficking,"
Hayward said. He said Applied DNA Sciences was primarily working with two
different types of DNA - an engineered DNA made from a botanical source that
allowed it to track that fiber back to its origin.

It was also trying to identify the natural DNA found in cotton fiber that
allowed researchers to know which species the cotton fiber is and where it comes
from. He said this gave hints that could provide a trail from finished goods
back to the crop although the level of analysis had not gone far enough yet to
be truly forensic.

But he said it would let a retailer or brand owner pick up their level of
attention and investigate a bit further into their supply chain - particularly
as they are facing mounting pressure from governments to ensure supply chains
are clean. "We do expect that in the next year or two it will be forensic and we
will be able to distinguish the global cultivars of cotton based on their point
of origin," he said.

"While our project is not yet complete we can certainly discern the
differences between some Uzbek strains of cotton versus American sources of a
similar cotton ... the DNA tells a story and it's very commercially and also
relevant to humanity."

Hayward said unraveling the complex cotton supply chain could set an example
on how to tackle other industries. "If we can help fix that we can help fix much
easier to sort our supply chains like pharmaceutics," he said.

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