CASE STUDY

Case study 1: Fake GOTS certificates in India

Context:

In 2020 fake organic cotton was found by GOTS in India; An investigation into organic cotton fraud in India has revealed 20,000 metric tonnes of cotton were incorrectly certified as organic through a scam abusing the Indian government certification system

Description: Following up rumors about systematic fraud, surveillance audits were carried out by the Global Organic Textile Standards (GOTS) accreditation body IOAS, which detected fake Raw Cotton Transaction Certificates (TCs).

These transaction certificates had been created by fraudsters using templates with fake QR codes, which led to a cloned website of the APEDA (Agricultural and Processed Food Products Export Development Authority of the Indian Government) to pretend the TCs were authentic.

GOTS accepts raw organic cotton if it is certified to any of the iFoam Family of Standards. In India, the nodal agency to certify organic raw cotton for export is APEDA. Its system is similar to GOTS, where TCs are issued by certification bodies and carry information about certified produce (volume, transport details, buyer, seller, etc).

After these revelations GOTS instructed its approved certification bodies to cancel all wrongly issued upstream transaction certificates in order to prevent affected goods being sold with GOTS labels and a certification ban has been imposed on 11 companies, and the contract with one approved certification bodies was terminated. GOTS has submitted all facts to APEDA urging investigation, criminal prosecution and improvement. All GOTS certified organisations have been informed on the matter and are being provided guidance accordingly.

Being a processing standard, GOTS had until that point relied on national law-based and governmentally supervised organic cotton production – but after this incident GOTS introduced its own measures to secure against such fraud. All incoming transaction certificates (for organic raw material) into the GOTS supply chain are checked by GOTS itself for authenticity and credibility.

Textile Exchange, which has been working in collaboration with GOTS for many years in both policy alignment as well as being recognised as an acceptable input into its Organic Content Standard (OCS) also banned the fraudulent companies. A certification body has also had its licensing contract with Textile Exchange terminated.

Lesson Learnt:

We can’t be 100% sure of the accuracy of certifications. For example, some big factories can be certified “ethical” but use smaller contractors, to help them create different garments, that are not using ethical practices.

No brand can be blindly trusted, especially for some lifelong labels that don’t audit enough and never by surprise. So, what can we do?

Research, as we said, it is hard work, but it needs to be done.

Another good option is local and small companies. Certifications can be costly when you are just a brand-new company and just because you cannot afford the label doesn’t necessarily mean that you are not ethical. The lack of certification on local or small companies doesn’t mean we have to avoid them.