Well, amazingly enough, they actually mentioned the cotton prices on the evening news (CBS) - said it is up 400% and that some dealers are now hoarding cotton bales..
copied from CBS evening news:
http://www.cbsnews.com/stories/2010/...n7054556.shtml
"Last spring bad weather in India, Pakistan and China destroyed cotton fields, slashing the global supply while demand is higher than ever. The growing middle class in those countries is spending its new-found wealth on western-style cotton clothes.
Rich Delano works in China, where investors are ignoring stocks and buying bales.
"What they're doing is they're buying actually containers of cotton yarn and holding it, sitting on it," he says.
That ups the prices, which are just now trickling down the supply chain.
The cotton costs more, so the pockets cost more, which means all-cotton jeans are going cost you more. Higher prices are a tough sell in this economy, so manufacturers are cutting where they can, using synthetic blends, lowering labor costs and searching for long-term alternatives, including from an unlikely source: Bamboo. It looks like cotton, feels like cotton and at this point is cheaper than cotton. Delano says inquiries for his bamboo fabric are up almost 50 percent.
"More manufacturers and more brands, more designers are looking for alternative fibers, alternative fabrics," says Delano. "