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by laci37 1021 days ago
Is cotton cultivation that bad in areas that were not artificially made suitable for the crop by the Soviet Union?
2 comments

To produce a kilo of cotton (roughly equivalent to a t-shirt and a pair of jeans) takes 20,000L of water. It’s just fundamentally an extremely thirsty crop.

Not to mention that cotton is notorious for depleting soil nutrients, so it is often grown with very large amounts of fertilizer, which also polluted waterways and their outlets into the oceans.

> artificially made suitable

Don’t know what you mean by that but the Soviet having made worse does not mean other countries approach is water-friendly. See https://ris.utwente.nl/ws/files/6843583/water_footprint_of_c...