How climate change is making tampons (and lots of other stuff) more expensive.
Cotton left over after the harvest in Meadow, Texas, Jan. 19, 2023.
West Texas is the main source of upland cotton in the United States, which in turn is the world’s third-biggest producer and largest exporter of the fiber. That means the collapse of the upland cotton crop in West Texas will spread beyond the United States, economists say, onto store shelves around the world.
By 2040, half of the regions around the globe where cotton is grown will face a “high or very high climate risk” from drought, floods and wildfires, according to the nonprofit group Forum for the Future. That is the same region that was abandoned by more than 2 million people during the Dust Bowl of the 1930s, caused by severe drought and poor farming practices. John Steinbeck famously chronicled the trauma in his epic “The Grapes of Wrath,” about a family of cotton farmers driven from their Oklahoma home.
When Evans began farming cotton in 1992, he said, he was able to irrigate about 90% of his fields with water from the Ogallala. Now that’s down to 5% and declining, he said. He has been growing cotton in rotation with other crops and using new technologies to maximize the precious little moisture that does arrive from the skies. But he sees farmers around him giving up.
“That’s why cotton really stands out, with this drought having such a big impact on the national crop,” Honig said. Frye and others who deal in denim did point out, however, that other factors have driven up price, including the ban on imports of Xinjiang cotton, high fuel costs and the complicated logistics of moving materials.
On a recent Sunday at a Walmart in Alexandria, Virginia, several shoppers said they had noticed rising prices.
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