By Kerry TruemanBrits are not amused by this laughable billboard promoting American cotton as “soft, sensual and sustainable.” Setting aside the absurdity of the National Cotton Council’s cotton-pickin’ poster girl–a blue-eyed, blonde babe with a bushel of freshly picked cotton bolls”there’s the slogan. As British blogger Jack Thurston sputtered:

Sustainable??!…Try telling that to the millions of impoverished cotton farmers in West Africa whose livelihoods are decimated by the flood of heavily subsidised US cotton on the world market, driving down prices and stealing markets. Try telling that to US taxpayers who foot the bill for more than $2 billion a year in handouts to US cotton farmers. Much of the US cotton industry is a creature of government subsidy, including some $264 million in illegal export subsidies in 2004. Try telling that to the people who live in cotton producing areas and see their water courses sucked dry by thirsty cotton plantations and face dangerous levels of pesticide runoff in their water supplies.

But Thurston didn’t stop there. He’s filed a complaint against the US Cotton Council International, on the grounds that this misleading ad violates the UK’s Code of Advertising. Thurston’s complaint makes the compelling case that American cotton production is neither environmentally nor economically sustainable. You can second his indignation by e-mailing Stephanie Thiers, European Representative of the Cotton Council International, at sthiers@cotton.org. Ask the Cotton Council to come clean and cut out the green washing.