The Algodão Paraíba Project, conceived and managed by the Natural Cotton Color company, involves eight municipalities in the semiarid region. There are more than 600 hectares of planted area, involving around 300 families of farmers gathered in rural settlements and traditional communities in Paraíba, Northeast region of Brazil.
The environmental, social and economic sustainability project is based on the planting of colored cotton with a guaranteed purchase contract. Thus, the objective is to strengthen the Local Productive Arrangement (APL) by inserting small landowners who are always organized in family farming associations, including traditional quilombola communities.
Since 2016, Natural Cotton Color has been supplying small, medium and large weaving mills with cotton feathers grown in the Margarida Maria Alves settlement, in Juarez Távora, a rural region of the state. It also continues to supply knits and flat fabrics to other fashion brands.
In 2019, to meet the growing demand, it expanded cultivation in the Fazenda Campos settlement, among other small communities in the surroundings. More recently, the municipalities of Ingá and Itabaiana were included in the Algodão Paraíba Project. The expectation is that there will be more and more territories in 2022, making the State of the Northeast a reference in this raw material and abundance for farmers.
