We are pleased to announce that a new online community for Textile Exchange’s OCRT will launch later this month in the Hub. Access to the OCRT Hub will be open to all those who agree to the OCRT membership requirements detailed in this sign-up form. It is not required to be a member of Textile Exchange.

An online home for the OCRT has been in the pipeline for some time but the COVID-19 pandemic has made it an even greater priority. The OCRT Hub will allow our global audience to continue engaging and driving change despite ongoing travel restrictions.

Many readers will remember the “Global Organic Cotton Community Platform” – a Community of Practice hosted by Textile Exchange and Helvetas between 2009 and 2017, with funding from ICCO and SECO. The new OCRT Hub will take a similar approach to engaging the organic cotton community through virtual dialogues, and will provide a place for us to keep the community up to date with the latest developments from our Global and Regional Organic Cotton Round Tables and Working Groups.

Textile Exchange’s Organic Cotton Round Table (OCRT) was established in 2012 when the organization declared a Call to Action prompted by a decline in organic cotton production in spite of growing demand. Every year since its inception, the OCRT has held a one day, in-person meeting alongside Textile Exchange’s annual Textile Sustainability Conference. The global OCRT summit has always been highly interactive and action-oriented and is typically attended by 150-200 individuals including farmer representatives, manufacturers, brands, retailers, traders, NGOs, and trade associations. The OCRT quickly became the primary place and space for stakeholders to get together to hear more about issues facing the organic cotton sector, to diagnose these issues and, most importantly, find ways to take action.  

The OCRT initially focused on addressing key challenges in the stability and sustainability of the organic cotton sector at a global level through the lens of three workstreams: Business Models, Seed and Soils, and Consumer Engagement. Under these workstreams, the OCRT identified a number of initiatives and has either catalyzed, or been an incubator for, their development. Such initiatives include the Organic Cotton Accelerator, the Chetna Coalition, aboutorganiccotton.org (a microsite dedicated to organic cotton), an inventory of non-GMO seed availability, and the OCRT Innovation Award.  

After a number of years of approaching barriers to growth in organic cotton at the global level, the need to customize strategies at the regional level become increasingly apparent. Ultimately, the same issues and opportunities exist for all, but each region is at a different stage of development and therefore requires a different strategy, alongside designated resources and networks of supporters. As a result, the Regional OCRT model was born in 2017. So far, Regional OCRTs have been held in Turkey (2017, 2018), Burkina Faso (2018 and 2020), and China (2019).  Planning is also in the works for a Regional OCRT for Latin America & the Caribbean.

The latest component of the OCRT is the launch of an online community -the OCRT Hub – in September 2020, which will enable dialogues to continue throughout the year and reach a wider audience. As for the other Round Tables of Textile Exchange, the OCRT’s virtual home is hosted on Textile Exchange’s online membership portal, the Hub.