Other problems raised by Earthsight include land grabbing, violence and corruption.

British NGO Earthsight accused a range of popular clothing and homeware items from H&M and Zara of being linked to large-scale illegal deforestation.

Other problems raised by the organization include land grabbing, violence and corruption. It turns out that Earthsight research concluded that fast fashion is connected to the boom in Brazilian cotton production for export.

Notably, large-scale farms in Brazil's Cerrado region are among the largest cotton producers in the country. It is a vast region of plateaus and wide valleys that cover a quarter of the Brazilian territory and is home to 5% of all the world's species.

Earthsight reports that deforestation in the Cerrado has increased by 43% in 2023. Most of it occurs due to illegal operations sponsored by "mega-farms" that grow cotton.

Likewise, the NGO traced 816,000 tons of cotton from the investigated farms to 8 Asian companies that manufactured almost 250 million finished clothing and household items over twelve months for the global stores of H&M and/or Zara and sister brands of Zara, Bershka, Pull&Bear, among others.

The products are worth many hundreds of millions of dollars and include apparent bestsellers: items shown at the top of the results page after generic searches on the retailers' websites.

Paradoxically, all of the contaminated cotton traced by Earthsight was certified sustainable by Better Cotton. In this way, H&M and Zara become the largest users of BC worldwide, despite everything indicating that it would be a case of greenwashing.