The UK’s Advertising Standards has banned a series of adverts by Cotton Council International for claiming that its cotton is produced in an environmentally sustainable way.

Trading under the Cotton USA banner, the adverts described its cotton as “Soft, sensual and sustainable”, but the advertising regulators received three complaints challenging the advert arguing that cotton is a “pesticide- and insecticide-intensive crop” that could “seriously deplete” groundwater in the high plains region of the USA.

In its ruling, the ASA concluded that magazine and poster adverts for Cotton USA, which state “soft, sensual and sustainable, it‘s Cotton USA,” should “no longer appear in their current form.”

One complainant also challenged whether US cotton subsidies had a negative impact on cotton farmers in the developing world, particularly in West Africa.

Cotton Council International (CCI) said they believed US cotton production, whether produced conventionally or organically, met reasonable and generally accepted definitions of ‘sustainability’. They quoted the United Nations definition, the US Environmental Protection Agency’s definition and a US Congress definition of the term sustainable. They also said whilst definitions could vary, they believed the basic principles remained constant: “economic viability, protection for the environment and social responsibility.”

“In light of the recent ASA ruling regarding the use of the word ‘sustainable’ in our advertising, we firmly believe that our U.S. cotton production systems are sustainable and environmentally sound,” said Allen Terhaar, executive director of Cotton Council International.

The CCI also maintained that cotton had been wrongly cited as a water intensive crop. They said it was very drought tolerant and used about the same amount of water as other major crops and provided evidence to show that just 35% of the US crop was irrigated.

CCI also said there was an overwhelming move to the planting of biotech or genetically modified (GM) cotton in the US, and that biotech varieties used less pesticide.

However, the ASA upheld the complaints saying “we considered that evidence that the current switch to GM cotton in the US was responsible for less pesticide use than previously was not equivalent to evidence that US cotton production was ‘sustainable’.” The Authority also noted that it was “concerned that there was a division of informed and scientific opinion as to the relative water efficiency of cotton as a crop.”

The authority decided that since it believed “there was no universally agreed definition of the term ‘sustainable’ and there appeared to be a significant division of informed opinion as to whether cotton production in the US could be described as ‘sustainable’ or not under various available definitions, the term ‘sustainable’ in the CCI ad was likely to be ambiguous and unclear to consumers.”

“We concluded that CCI had not justified the claim,” said the ASA.

Failure to comply with the ASA judgments could result in an advertiser being brought before the UK’s Office of Fair Trading.

Source: ecotextile news

This entry was posted on Thursday, March 20th, 2008 at 12:00 pm and is filed under Industry News. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.