Bombay Flying Club

WEB DOCUMENTARY & ONLINE STORYTELLING SINCE 2005

Cotton documentary in GEO magazine

Cotton is the fabric of our life. We wear its fibers on our skin. We pay for our cotton-filtered coffee with cotton-based paper money, ingest pressed cotton seeds in potato chips and enjoy ice cream thickened with cotton additives. Cotton linters spread polish on our nails. Recent history is on cotton-based photographic film. Its oil is used for cooking, feeding livestock and producing biofuel.

The darker side of this fabric of our life spins another tale. A distorted and highly subsidized market has ruined millions of peasants around the world. 270,000 Indian farmers have committed suicide since 1995, after being forced to depend on corporate seed supply. And excessive irrigation in Central Asia turned a fertile paradise into a polluted desert.

Uwe Martin's story about the social and environmental effects of global cotton production in India, Texas, Burkina Faso, Brazil and Central Asia is now published by GEO magazine. Besides a 17-page magazine spread on print the German iPad edition also presents ten short films from the project.

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