Global Organic Cotton Community Platform

Welcome! This platform has been created for active members of the global organic cotton community to share conversations, knowledge and information about organic and fair-trade cotton.
It is open to all interested people having a stake in the organic and fair-trade cotton area. There is no fee to participate. Just register and log-in.

Why Participate in this Space?

As a Member of the Global Organic Cotton Community Space, you can look forward to:

• quick responses to your questions on hot issues
• saving time gathering information
• staying up to date with the latest news
• being part of a constantly evolving network of people working in the same field of interest
• participating in shaping strategies in the global organic cotton sector
• key learnings and summaries of discussions held in topic-specific online dialogues

Online Dialogues on Organic Cotton

Our overall area of interest is “organic and fair-trade cotton”. Within this thematic area topics to be discussed are defined by participants themselves, based on their needs and interests.

Background

In recent years Helvetas (the Swiss Association for International Cooperation), Organic Exchange and ICCO (Dutch Interchurch Organisation for Development Co-operation) intensified their collaboration in the area of organic and fair-trade cotton, in order to use synergies and work more efficiently by exchanging information and by learning from each others’ experiences.

They felt the need to have additional tools and processes to exchange views, opinions and experiences on their work, both among themselves and with other people working in the organic cotton sector. So they decided to establish and run a web platform to exchange knowledge and information on organic and fair-trade cotton complementing face to face meetings.

At the end of 2007 ICCO, SECO (Swiss state secretariat for economic affairs) and Helvetas assured co-funding to bring the Global Organic Cotton Community Space into being. The web platform went live in February 2009, facilitated and administrated by Helvetas.

Language of Online Dialogues

The main language is English, but participants can also contribute in Spanish or French. Discussions will occasionally be summarised in the three languages by the facilitator, but individual contributions cannot be translated.
There are but tools for translating web-pages into some of the more common international languages include:
Babelfish
Google Translate
These tools will provide an idea of what is written but cannot be expected to be exact translations.

Links:

SECO
ICCO
Helvetas
Organic Exchange