Chetna Organic Cotton

Chetna Organic is a unique 360° development intervention for smallholder (&tribal) farmer families primarily dependent on rainfed agriculture. Chetna was established with the primary aim of enhancing their livelihood options through making their farming systems more profitable and sustainable. Chetna focus states include Andhra Pradesh, Maharashtra and Odisha and with specific technical services extended to other states.

The Chetna Organic & Fair Trade Cotton Intervention Program started in 2004 as a composite pilot on Organic / Non-Pesticide Management (NPM) & Fair-trade supply chain development,in response to the agrarian crisis in India. The intent was to improve livelihood options of smallholder farmers by making their farm systems more sustainable, profitable and creating access to ethical and fair-trade markets in cotton. 

Not with an intent of indulging in charity but venture philanthropy so as to empower farmers by engaging them to build an ethical supply chain for cotton supported by international collaboration through its triple bottom-line objectives, which believes in principles of ecological (viz. Organic) and Social (viz. Fair Trade) sustainability and is self-sustainable enterprise through making nominal, non-exploitative profits (self supporting) for the stakeholders, the farms. Towards this goal, the program spawned the twin farmer-owned organizations:

  • Chetna Organic Farmers Association (COFA), a farmer owned not-for-profit that engages in technical and social extension, capacity building, institution building support to farmers and farmer co-operatives, promotion of CSR investment in farmer communities and policy and advocacy work on rain-fed agriculture and related issues.
  • Chetna Organic Agriculture Producer Company Ltd (COAPCL) is a farmer owned finance and market linkage commodity-trading company  that works on developing sustainable market linkages for farmer’s produce in national and international markets.

FFID provides guardianship support to both COFA and COAPCL to evolve into professional and well-established farmers’ support organizations.


Fair Trade

The Global Organic Textile Standard (GOTS) is recognized as the world's leading processing standard for textiles made from organic fibers. It defines high-level environmental criteria along the entire organic textiles supply chain and requires compliance with social criteria as well.

The Fairtrade America team works directly with companies and shoppers to get a better deal for farmers and workers. We are an independent non-profit 501(c)3 organization.

We are a business that meets all the Fairtrade criteria, we are proud to use the Fairtrade Mark on our products to let people know that we are ethically sourcing from Fairtrade farms.


Low Impact Dyes

Our draw string bags and interior bag lining is created from 100% Certified Organic and Fair Trade Cotton. We create our Maasai Mask pattern by using the highest quality low impact dies. A low-impact dye is a dye that has been classified by the Oeko-Tex Standard 100 (an international certification process) as eco-friendly. Generally, low impact dyes do not contain toxic chemicals or mordants (which fix the dye to the fabric), require less rinsing and have a high absorption rate in the fabric.