Worldwide, we have effectively farmed and stored enough cotton to make 17 shirts for every person on Earth!

According to Quartz, the USDA estimates by the middle of 2016 the world will have stockpiled about 50 billion pounds of cotton, which is enough to make 127 billion shirts.

“It’s an enormous amount of cotton thatΆs been stored,” Stephen MacDonald, a senior economist at the USDA, told Quartz.

Why are we storing so much cotton?

Quartz reports that China has instituted a program to buy up cotton surpluses in an effort to create a short-supple market — this will ensure that farmers will make the minimum price on their harvest.

Cotton, however, doesnΆt last forever and becomes less desirable as it ages, leaving us wondering: where else the resources used to produce and store it might have been better utilized?