Three Reasons U.S.

Cotton Is King

You can grow cotton in places where land and labor are cheap. You can grow it in
places that are close to the countries — Colombia, Indonesia, Bangladesh — where
the Planet Money T-shirt was made. Yet most of the cotton in the Planet Money T-shirts
was grown in the U.S. In fact, the U.S. exports more cotton than any country in the
world. Here are three reasons why.

1. TECHNOLOGY

SO MUCH COTTON, SO FEW PEOPLE -Bowen Flowers, a Mississippi cotton farmer,

shared some of the numbers behind his operation.

The U.S. has perfected cotton by treating it as a high-tech product.

Genetically modified crops are controversial, but not among U.S. cotton farmers:
Roughly 90 percent of U.S. cotton comes from genetically modified seeds that were
designed in labs to produce more cotton and resist pests.

And when it’s time to harvest the cotton, U.S. farmers use, essentially, giant robots.
Just last year, Bowen Flowers, the cotton farmer in the video, bought five John Deere
7760 pickers. They’re the size of tanks, but are finely tuned, self-driving machines that
sense the cotton plant stalks and twist off just the cotton puffs. Flowers says he paid
about $600,000 for each picker.

Like the seeds, the pickers get more productive every year as the technology
improves. The newest John Deere picker needs just one guy to do what it took five
guys to do a couple years ago. One driver can pick 100 acres of cotton a day — and
he barely needs to touch the steering wheel.

2. REPORT CARDS

Every year, the U.S. Department of Agriculture tests all 17 million bales of cotton
harvested in the U.S. The farmers pay for the testing, and the USDA figures out exactly
how fine, long, strong and bright white every batch of cotton is. Cotton buyers all
around the world can get a report card that tells them everything they need to know
about every bale of U.S. cotton.

Here are a few key specs for a sample from Bowen Flowers’ crop.

HOW BOWEN FLOWERS’ COTTON RATED

To understand how this keeps American cotton on top, it helps to travel 10,000 miles to
Indonesia, where our cotton was spun into yarn for the men’s T-shirt. (When we say
“yarn,” think thread. In the clothing business, people call it yarn.)

A factory manager there told us that, when he orders U.S. cotton, he knows exactly
what he’s getting before he ever sees or touches the cotton. The spinners have a
special recipe for their yarn, and they need exactly the right cotton — exactly the right
color, exactly the right length, exactly the right fineness. No surprises.

The USDA testing means a cotton buyer in Indonesia can order a bale of U.S. cotton
that’s guaranteed to match his exact specifications, every time.

3. SUBSIDIES
U.S. cotton farmers benefit from a bunch of government subsidy programs. (Other
countries subsidize their cotton farmers as well, by the way.) The government gives
taxpayer money directly to cotton farmers, and subsidizes insurance that protects
farmers if their harvest is weak or cotton prices fall.

Why The Recipe For Our Yarn Is Like The Secret Formula For Coke

There are 6 miles of yarn in a single Planet Money T-shirt. If any of that yarn is too
thick or too thin, even by a little bit, the T-shirt could start falling apart after just a few
washes. (Yarn, by the way, is what ordinary people call thread. In the garment
business, it’s called yarn.)
Spinning yarn is high-tech and shockingly complex. The yarn for the Planet Money T-
shirt had to meet dozens of specifications — thickness, tenacity, the amount of twist,
the direction of the twist. Newtons per tex!

But even though we ordered thousands of shirts, our supplier, Jockey, wouldn’t tell us
exactly what those specs were. “That’s our special sauce,” said Marion Smith, a senior
vice president at Jockey. It’s like the secret formula for Coke, but softer on the skin.
The Planet Money men’s T-shirt was spun into yarn at a $35 million factory in
Indonesia. What you get for that money is a factory that can make yarn with
incredible precision and consistency, 24 hours a day, 361 days a year. (It takes
four days off at the end of Ramadan.)

“When I see people just picking up a T-shirt and putting it back on the shelf in a
store,” says Anupam Agrawal, who heads the spinning operation at the factory, “I
say, ‘Hey, man. We worked very hard to make the yarn which has made that T-
shirt. Give it some respect.’ ”
Jockey’s recipe for the yarn may be a secret, but Agrawal’s factory is using
machines that anyone with enough money can buy. Right now, Indonesia is in a
sweet spot in the middle of the global T-shirt trade. Wages are lower here than
they are in developed countries. At the same time, unlike many countries where
labor is even cheaper, Indonesia has a few key things that are essential for
keeping a high-tech factory humming: an educated workforce; cheap, reliable
electricity; and a relatively stable government.

But staying in the sweet spot in a global economy is almost impossible. At some
point, a country that has cheaper labor or is closer to where clothes are made will
find the money, the electricity and the workers to build its own spinning industry.
Why Workers Like Jasmine Are Getting A Raise

This is the world behind our T-shirt: women like Jasmine and Doris working long
hours in difficult conditions, dreaming of better lives for their families.
They’re part of a global wave that goes
all the way back to the Industrial
Revolution in England, when the first
textile factories were created. In China in
the 1980s, South Korea in the 1970s,
America in the 1800s, and many other
countries over the years, workers —
mostly women — left subsistence farms
to work in factories.
The factories can be brutal, dangerous places. In 1911, a fire at the Triangle
Shirtwaist Factory in New York killed over 100 workers, prompting major reforms
that improved working conditions. Earlier this year, more than 1,000 workers
were killed when the Rana Plaza factory building in Bangladesh collapsed. Huge
protests around the country followed, and Western companies that buy clothes in
Bangladesh faced increasing pressure to improve working conditions and wages.

That pressure led the country to almost double its minimum wage, from $39 a
month to $68 a month. Still, that’s far below the $104 a month the workers were
asking for. (The workers who made the Planet Money T-shirt were making about
$80 a month when we were there earlier this year. Their wages are likely to rise,
now that the minimum wage has gone up.)
 Fact
ory owners worry that if the minimum keeps going up, the garment industry will
find someplace else to make T-shirts. That’s what’s happened for decades: When
labor costs rose in one country, Western buyers found someplace cheaper, and
prices for clothes continued to fall.

In the case of the Planet Money T-shirt, the buyer is Jockey. The company told us
that the pattern of pulling out when wages rise may be coming to an end for now,
because there’s no country that’s ready to replace Bangladesh as the cheapest
place in the world to make clothes.

Wages in Bangladesh are going to rise, Marion Smith, a senior vice president at
Jockey, told us. “That’s good news from a humanitarian point of view.”

But the long-run picture for Bangladeshi garment workers is less clear.
In China, South Korea and Japan, to name just a few countries, the textiles and
apparel industry brought with it investment and manufacturing knowledge, which
those countries used to expand into higher-wage industries like electronics. As
economies grow and countries move into other, more lucrative industries, textiles
and apparel become less important. But the same may not happen in
Bangladesh.

Bangladesh stands out on

the graph for a few
reasons. For one, apparel
exports make up a bigger
share of Bangladesh’s
exports than they ever did
for any of the other
countries. And that share is
still rising. If the next
generation of workers like Jasmine is to have more opportunities, that line needs
to fall, and Bangladesh needs to expand into other industries.

Why You Can Send A Shirt Around The World For Pennies
The Planet Money T-shirts traveled around the world on their way to you. The
women’s shirt was made in Colombia, from cotton grown in the U.S. The men’s
shirt was made in Indonesia and Bangladesh.

All this travel was made affordable by one simple innovation: the shipping
container.

Big metal boxes might not seem like an innovation. But without the humble
container, the global economy wouldn’t be nearly as global as it is — and the
Planet Money T-shirt wouldn’t have been made the way it was.
Before containers, single ships were sometimes loaded with hundreds of
thousands of different things — bananas, fish meal, steel pipes — all stuffed into
sacks and boxes of different sizes. Workers had to pack each bag and box into
the ship individually. Even with 50 or 100 people working, it could take weeks to
unload and reload a single ship.

Malcolm McLean, who

led the move to
containers, had no
experience with ships at
all. McLean owned a
trucking company back in
the 1950s, before the
interstate highway
system was built. It took
forever for his trucks to
get through traffic up and
down the East Coast.

McLean had an idea: What if he put his trucks onto the ship in New York, and
sailed them down the coast to North Carolina? He could hop over all that traffic!
McLean eventually gave up on the idea of driving entire trucks onto boats and
moved on to something that in the end makes a lot more sense. A truck is
basically an engine attached to a box — so McLean made the box detachable.

Cranes could move the boxes from the trucks to the ship in New York. Cranes
could put the boxes back on trucks in North Carolina. Not only would he skip
traffic; it would make it profoundly easier to load and unload ships than it was
before. (For much more on this story, see The Box, by Marc Levinson.)
Longshoremen fought containers for years: They saw that, with cranes and
standardized containers, the number of people needed to load and unload ships
would plummet. In the end, shipping companies agreed to pay into funds that
would compensate workers who lost their jobs.

Standardized containers took off around the world, and by the mid-1960s
McLean — the guy who dreamed of putting trucks on boats to avoid traffic — had
put together a fleet of container ships making international trips. The age of
containers had begun, and it greatly reduced the cost of shipping. A global
distribution system emerged around standardized boxes that could be easily
moved from ships to trains to trucks.

Supercheap transport was a key reason

that apparel companies went from
making clothes in one place to managing
global supply chains — so that, for
example, a single T-shirt might start as
U.S. cotton, then travel to Indonesia,
Bangladesh and back to the U.S., all for
far less than a dollar in shipping costs.