Warming Is Withering Cotton
Climate Change Ruins Crops And Contributes to Inflation
When the U.S. Department of Agriculture finished its calculations in January, the findings were startling: 2022 was a disaster for upland cotton in Texas, the state where the coarse fiber is primarily grown and then sold around the globe in the form of tampons, cloth diapers, gauze pads and other products. In the biggest loss on record, Texas farmers abandoned 74 percent of their planted crops — nearly 2.5 million hectares — because of heat and parched soil, hallmarks of a megadrought made worse by climate change.
That crash has helped to push up the price of tampons in the United States 13 percent over the past year. The price of cloth diapers spiked 21 percent. Cotton balls climbed 9 percent and gauze bandages increased by 8 percent. All of that was well above the country’s overall inflation rate of 6.5 percent in 2022, according to data provided by the market research firms NielsenIQ and The NPD Group.
It is an example of how climate change is reshaping the cost of daily life.
West Texas is the main source of upland cotton in the United States, which is the world’s third-biggest producer and largest exporter of the fiber. The collapse of the crop in West Texas will spread to store shelves around the world, economists say.
“Climate change is a secret driver of inflation,” said Nicole Corbett, a vice president at NielsenIQ. “As extreme weather continues to impact crops and production capacity, the cost of necessities will continue to rise.”
In Pakistan, the world’s sixth-largest producer of upland cotton, severe flooding, made worse by climate change, destroyed half that country’s cotton crop. Experts say that the impact of the warming planet is expanding with consequences that may be felt for decades to come. By 2040, half of the regions around the globe where cotton is grown will face a “high or very high climate risk” from drought, floods and wildfires, according to the nonprofit Forum for the Future.
Scientists project that heat and
drought will continue to shrink yields in the American Southwest. A 2020 study found that the production of upland cotton in Arizona had already been lowered, and it projected that yields in the region could drop by 40 percent between 2036 and 2065.
Cotton is “a bellwether crop,” said Natalie Simpson, an expert in logistics at the University at Buffalo in New York State. “When weather destabilizes it, you see changes almost immediately. This is true anywhere it’s grown. And the future supply that everyone depends on is going to look very different from how it does now.”
For decades, the Southwestern cotton crop has depended on the Ogallala Aquifer, which stretches underneath eight western states from Wyoming to Texas. But the Ogallala is declining, in part because of climate change, according to the 2018 National Climate Assessment, a report issued by 13 American agencies. “Major portions of the Ogallala Aquifer should now be considered a nonrenewable resource,” it said.
That is the same region that was abandoned by over two million people during the Dust Bowl of the 1930s, caused by severe drought and poor farming practices. John Steinbeck chronicled the trauma in his epic “The Grapes of Wrath,” about a family of cotton farmers driven from Oklahoma.
Lately, the novel has been weighing on the mind of Mark Brusberg, an Agriculture Department meteorologist. “The last time this happened there was a mass migration of producers from where they couldn’t survive any longer to a place where they were going to give it a shot,” he said. “But we have to figure out how to keep that from happening again.”
In the years since, the farmland over the Ogallala once again flourished as farmers drew from the aquifer to irrigate their fields. But now, with the rise in heat and drought, dust storms are returning, the National Climate Assessment found. Climate change is projected to increase the duration and intensity of drought over much of the Ogallala region in the next 50 years.
Last spring, Barry Evans, a fourth-generation cotton farmer near Lubbock, Texas, planted nearly 1,000 hectares of cotton. He harvested 200. “This is one of the worst years of farming I’ve ever seen,” he said. “We’ve lost a lot of the Ogallala Aquifer, and it’s not coming back.”
When Mr. Evans began farming cotton in 1992, he said, he was able to irrigate about 90 percent of his fields with water from the Ogallala. Now that is down to 5 percent and declining, he said. He has been growing cotton in rotation with other crops and using new technologies to maximize the little moisture that does arrive from the skies. But he sees farmers around him giving up.
Kody Bessent, the chief executive of Plains Cotton Growers, which represents farmers who grow cotton across 1.6 million hectares in Texas, said that land would produce four or five million bales of cotton in a typical year. Production for 2022 is projected at 1.5 million bales — a cost to the regional economy of $2 billion to $3 billion, he said. “It’s a huge loss,” he said. “It’s been a tragic year.”
Sam Clay of Toyo Cotton Company, a Dallas trader that buys upland cotton from farmers and sells it to mills, said the collapse had sent him scrambling. “Prices have gone sky-high, and all this is getting passed on to consumers,” he said.
Among the cotton products most sensitive to the price of raw materials are personal care items like tampons and gauze bandages, since they require very little labor or processing like dyeing, spinning or weaving, said Jon Devine, an economist at Cotton Incorporated, a research and marketing company.
Farmers like Mr. Evans say they would like expanded government funding for disaster relief programs to cover the impact of increasingly severe drought, and to pay farmers for planting cover crops that help retain soil moisture. But some economists say it may not make sense to continue to support a crop that will no longer be viable as the planet continues to warm.
“Since the 1930s, government programs have been fundamental to growing cotton,” said Daniel Sumner, an agricultural economist at the University of California, Davis. “But there’s not a particular economic argument to grow cotton in West Texas as the climate changes.”
In the long run, it could just mean that cotton is no longer the main ingredient in everything from tampons to textiles, Mr. Sumner said, “and we’re all going to use polyester.”
Scenes of drought echoing ‘The Grapes of Wrath.’