Greenville, SC: Eastern Trading Co.
On November 24 I had the great luck to meet Jordan Lea and his partner Phil Canale in Greenville. Jordan and Phil are cotton merchants and run Eastern Trading Company. I spent most of the morning learning about cotton pricing and the global cotton trade from Jordan. He shared a lot of comparative figures between the US and China, including the extraordinary growth and decline in cotton production in China and the US: In 1998 China grew 21 million bales and in 2008 they grew 51 million bales. In these same time frame, the US grew 11.4 million bales and this year only 4.4 million. In the last 10 years there has also been a reversal in the amount of US cotton that is exported– now, most of it leaves the United States. Cotton consumption is also falling or at a complete stand still in some cases due to the global economic slow down.
In the afternoon we filmed some with Jordan as he talked with his future’s broker in California about the enormous drop in cotton prices and worked with Phil to negotiate some orders. Jordan also exchanged instant messages with a partner in Pakistan. I learned a great deal about prices, how futures work, and began to gain some insight into global trade. The great news for Cotton Road is that Jordan has a contact in China who receives all the cotton that is brought through the Port of Shanghai for inspection. Her name is Aurora Xie and she will be such an important person to me in China; Carl Brown’s bales of cotton will have to go through her before they are sent on to a mill. If it weren’t for Jordan’s help I would not be able to follow the cotton as closely as it now seems possible to do.
Jordan also told me about a folk artist in Georgia who paints rural cotton scenes onto tin. His name is Leonard Jones. A piece of Leonard’s was hanging in the Eastern Trading offices, a close up image of a figure with bowed head and a large hat, picking through a bushel of cotton. I can easily envision Leonard’s work on a poster or other visual material for the documentary.