F YOU BOUGHT A PAIR OF BLUE
jeans in 2011, you may have been
shocked at the price. Or maybe not: fashions
change, and maybe you thought you
were paying the price for being fashionable.
But you weren’t—you were paying
for cotton. Jeans are made of denim,
which is a particular weave of cotton,
and by late 2010, when jeans manufacturers
were buying supplies for the coming
year, cotton prices were more than
triple their level just two years earlier.
By December 2010, the price of a pound
of cotton had hit a 140-year high, the
highest cotton price since records began
in 1870.
And why were cotton prices so high?
On one side, demand for clothing of
all kinds was surging. In 2008–2009, as
the world struggled with the effects of a
financial crisis, nervous consumers cut
back on clothing purchases. But by 2010,
with the worst apparently over, buyers
were back in force. On the supply side,
severe weather events hit world cotton