The ICAC has always been responsible for representing the entire cotton supply chain including textiles, buying houses, retailers and brands but it hasn’t always done as well at that mission as it could have and limited its role only to cotton value chain. There has always been a need for the ICAC to offer exceptional value to consuming countries, moreover, to provide services to cotton producing countries to enter into textiles manufacturing to take full advantage of benefits of textiles value chain to create employment and initiate industrialization in their countries. Further, it was also required to holistically link the entire chain i.e. cotton, textiles and retail as the entire chain is independent and also interdependent as success and failure is connected.
The Member Governments are interested to either increase their international share in textiles exports especially of value-added products, initiate textiles manufacturing to fully utilize their home-grown cotton or attract investments etc. The companies are interested to expand their businesses by having new buyers and suppliers, and universities / research organizations are looking for the networking and academia-industry linkages.
ICAC has presence in cotton value chain since 1939 and it is very recent that ICAC has been planning to have a formal strategy for textiles value chain. Cotton, being part of the agriculture value chain while, textiles being an industrial sector has entirely different dynamics. Similarly, the government support, objectives and their strategies are entirely different especially in context to value addition. All these facts were kept while considering that what services ICAC develops for textiles.