‘Significant’ Volume of Xinjiang Cotton Mislabeled as US or Brazilian
Forced-labor-linked cotton from China’s Xinjiang Uyghur Autonomous Region is still sneaking its way into products sold by U.S. and global retailers, with a sizable portion hidden in blended fibers identified as American or Brazilian in origin, a new report has found.
That 19 percent of more than 820 cotton-containing samples, purchased and probed over a year, tested positive for Xinjiang cotton is “significant,” particularly in the wake of its ban in the United States under the two-year-old Uyghur Forced Labor Prevention Act.said MeiLin Wan, vice president of textile sales at DNA authentication firm Applied DNA Sciences.
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“If it was 5 or 10 percent, I’ll be saying, ‘Maybe that’s just an artifact,” said Wan, whose company conducted the study with isotopic analysis lab Stratum Reservoir. “But the fact that it sort of this one-in-five number is similar to what people have been recording and guesstimating.”
Isotopic testing is similar to a fingerprint comparison, except the fingerprints are the stable isotopes of chemical elements like carbon, oxygen, nitrogen and hydrogen. In 2022, German scientists used isotopic techniques to uncover traces of Xinjiang cotton in T-shirts and button-downs from Adidas, Puma and Hugo Boss, even though brands say they no longer source materials or products there.
Wan was referring to the oft-quoted statistic that one in five cotton garments sold globally contains Xinjiang cotton. China derives some 90 percent of its cotton from the northwestern province, where authorities have been accused of engaging in the widespread persecution and modern-day enslavement of Uyghurs and other Turkic Muslim minorities, though Beijing adamantly denies this. Chinese cotton, in turn, makes up roughly 20 percent of the world’s production of the white fluff.
Applied DNA Sciences and Stratum Reservoir’s finding also lines up with the 15 percent positivity rate that Customs and Border Protection, or CBP, found across 86 tests that it commissioned in December 2022 and April and May 2023, the results of which Reuters obtained through a Freedom of Information Act request. While the tested items had their brand names redacted, their descriptions identified garments such as jeans, T-shirts, dresses, boxers and baby onesies.
The latest investigation took off from there, Wan said. What if someone tested more than 86 items? And what if that same person didn’t look at only finished clothing but also yarns, fabrics, canvas footwear, socks and home textiles like kitchen towels and curtains that were not only U.S.-bound but could offer a “global bird’s eye view”?
Wan said that the companies decided to keep the identities of the offending brands under wraps, partly for legal reasons (“we obviously don’t want to be sued”) and partly because they wanted to be “helpful” rather than name and shame. She did note, however, that at least one-quarter of the samples would have entered the United States under the so-called de minimis “loophole,” which frees small packages valued at less than $800 from paying taxes, fees or tariffs and—crucially—subjects them to less scrutiny even though they’re not exempt from the UFLPA. A whopping 685 million of these packages inundated the country in 2022 alone, according to CBP.
Kimberly Glas, president and CEO of the National Council of Textile Organizations, a Washington, D.C and North Carolina-based trade group, wants to see de minimis shut down. It’s her opinion that the exemption is fueling forced labor and unfair environmental practices, as well as facilitating the trafficking of guns and illicit drugs like fentanyl. The same cheap shipments from China are also undercutting the competitiveness of domestic textile manufacturers, 16 of which have closed in the past several months. For Glas, this is nothing short of a “five-alarm fire situation.”
“This underscores the alarm that the industry has been raising for months about the infiltration of Xinjiang cotton into the United States,” she said of the assessment. “It’s literally it sitting in our closet being delivered to our doorsteps and UFLPA enforcement has been anemic. The penalties for UFLPA violation have been anemic.”
Wan said that the 19 percent figure wasn’t too surprising—China, after all, churns out a lot of yarn and fabric. What, in her words, “shocked” her, however, was the fact that 57 percent of the positive samples claimed to hail from the United States, followed by 12 percent from Brazil, 11 percent from Chinese provinces outside Xinjiang and 9 percent from Australia. At the same time, roughly half of China’s cotton imports come from Brazil and the United States, which means if there is any blending with domestic cotton to make up quantities, “it’s going to happen,” whether intentionally or not, Wan said.
“On the flip side, if you think about it, if there was going to be blending of cotton, wouldn’t U.S. cotton be the biggest target because of the UFLPA?” she said. “It may be that if people claim U.S. origin, they feel it won’t be checked or tested. This is not just a forced labor issue; this is a [Federal Trade Commission]-labeling issue.”
Rooting out Xinjiang cotton despite the UFLPA, Canada and Mexico’s modern slavery restrictions under the United States-Mexico-Canada Agreement and the European Union’s forthcoming forced labor regulation won’t be easy, said Sheng Lu, associate professor of fashion and apparel studies at the University of Delaware. For one thing, China’s national media has reported a 34.6 percent uptick in textile exports from Xinjiang, suggesting “more products containing Xinjiang cotton could be supplied to the world market” despite an increasing number of American fashion companies reducing their exposure to the superpower, he said.
“The findings reveal the daunting tasks of removing Xinjiang cotton from the supply chain and the additional technical support and practical tools fashion brands and retailers need to ensure no forced labor in the supply chain,” Lu said. China might also be getting around the U.S. blockade by increasing exports of non-cotton apparel. The first quarter of 2024 saw man-made fibers constitute 61.4 percent of China’s total apparel exports to the United States, a “notable rise” from the 55 percent reported in 2018, he said.
A 2021 report from the Helena Kennedy Centre for International Justice at Sheffield Hallam University also warned of “cotton laundering” through transnational trade that obscures the fiber’s true origin, allowing it to seep into the clothing of brands that have released statements insisting that they don’t source cotton, textiles or garments from Xinjiang or tolerate forced labor in any form.
“Just imagine a bucket of paint, right?” Wan said. “It starts off as blue. And as you start to add green, yellow, red, brown [and] purple, [it’s hard to] figure out what origin it has because you’ve got so many. That’s why recycled cotton is not easy to verify because they’re blending it and taking the fibers from God knows where. So truly unknown origins.”
At a House Committee on Homeland Security hearing in January, Eric Choy, CBP’s executive director for trade remedy and law enforcement, revealed that the agency has established an isotopic testing lab in Savannah, Ga.—it was previously using the New Zealand verification company Oritain, which also tests for brands like popular de minimis-reform target Shein—with similar setups in New York City and Los Angeles to follow.
Grant Cochrane, CEO of Oritain, said that the issue of “cotton from non-compliant areas” showing up throughout the supply chain isn’t new, but that brands that aren’t focused on supply chain traceability face a higher risk.
“Objective verification of supply chain sourcing is critical, and brands cannot rely on vendor self-declaration or mapping to get to the truth of their supply chains,” he said. “Without full transparency over their supply chains, brands may be unknowingly importing non-compliant cotton into the U.S.”
The best way to remove forced labor from the supply chain, Cochrane said, is closer collaboration between everyone within the supply chain ecosystem. That includes brands, suppliers and regulators.
Testing is something CBP needs to ramp up, Glas said. She also wants those results to be made public so that perpetrators of Xinjiang-linked or fraudulent imports can be held accountable and future offenses deterred.
“I aspire to be like the electronics industry,” she said. “They had a billion dollars detained last year; we had like $35 million detained when we had well over $100 billion textile and apparel imports come into the United States. What does that say to China? It says we’re not really looking. A 19 percent non-compliance rate is alarming.”
According to CBP’s UFLPA dashboard, border authorities have detained 1,405 shipments, with a combined value of nearly $56 million, since the law took effect in June 2022. Of these, 818 pieces of freight, worth almost $19 million, were ultimately denied entry. Some 351, valued at $27.5 million, were later given the green light.
Because of law enforcement and business sensitivities, CBP doesn’t provide additional information or plans to detain specific goods under the UFLPA. The agency says, however, that its approach to enforcement prioritizes the highest-risk goods, based on real-time data and intelligence, to prevent forced-labor goods from entering the United States.
Wan agreed that there’s a “serious amount of work to be done” beyond the paper documentation trail that the industry has been used to, pitching Applied DNA Sciences’ services, which includes its CertainT platform for “molecular-based security,” as one of the solutions.
“Physical verification of goods is important because there is a sort of global trend towards this blockchain everything and just capture everything digitally and let’s just exchange fiber coins or wherever,” she said. ”But that’s not going to hold water because it’s going to be a flood, right? There’s a flood of goods out there.”
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