Africa, including South Africa, is an important cotton-growing region with great potential to join the fast-growing global market for organic cotton production.

So says Rebecca Callahan Klein, director of the Organic Exchange, a non-profit trade organisation working to expand the use of organically grown cotton.

Callahan Klein was speaking at the Africa Regional Organic conference in Cape Town, a five-day event which brought together a wide variety of industry representatives to work towards strengthening Africa's production of organic cotton.

The meeting, hosted by the Organic Exchange, Woolworths and the Shell Foundation, has resulted in new commitments being made by leading global brands and retailers to enhance the African organic cotton producers' role in this growing market.

"Global demand for organic products has rocketed in the last few years and that trend is set to continue," said Kurt Hoffman, director of the Shell Foundation. "The potential benefits for developing world producers are enormous. Shell Foundation is working with them to realise those benefits by unlocking markets through the provision of seed-capital, business mentoring and strategic partnerships with major retailers."

Said Callahan Klein: "What we have laid down here is the foundation of a strong, united commitment to deriving sustainable livelihoods for all those involved in the chain, while creating true and great value for the world's consumers."

At the conference Nordstrom, a major US retailer, pledged $100 000 to the Organic Exchange to be used to support a farm development project for small-scale African growers. In South Africa, Woolworths has pledged in its "Good Business Journey" to sell in excess of R1 billion of organic cotton and to help develop an organic cotton pipeline in the country by 2012.

The global market for organic cotton is growing by 100% a year and is expected to reach $2.6bn by the end of 2008. Globally, cotton is the largest non-food crop grown, with 40 million farmers.

Growing cotton organically can have dramatic impacts on small-scale farmers. Benefits include lower input costs (fertilisers and pesticides) as well as the knock-on effects of rotation crops (such as peanuts and soy beans).