Internationalization is the theme for the cotton industry in this new century. Increased reliance on global markets & trade is driving priorities for development and adoption of international technical standards, and increased comparability of cotton classing technologies. Among the fiber properties that must be re-tooled urgently for the fresh market sensibilities are: color, moisture, neps, and broken/short fiber content. Researchers are now studying more closely the detailed distributions of fiber attributes, rather than average or summary values. Prominent among these properties are: fineness, maturity, tenacity, elongation, trash size, and fiber length in particular. Recent breakthroughs in understanding the mathematics of the fiber length distribution (FLD) have opened novel approaches to valuing fiber length. It has long been understood that measurements of FLD are necessary to determine characteristic length. But it has only recently been recognized that FLD can reveal the state of accumulated fiber damage. Now, there are those who ask why anyone should care about breakage and broken fiber. Does it really matter how the shape of the FLD arises; or do only the characteristic values count? The answer is, of course, that breakage is bad. Breakage degrades length & uniformity, and is the source of production of short fibers. Susceptibility to breakage is a predictor of poor textile mill processability. We now understand that cotton cleanability is the key ingredient of textile processability, and that cleanability is a tradeoff between cleaning and damage. There is an important market opportunity here for the cotton industries: if we can use the analysis of FLD to learn how to evaluate and minimize cotton damage, and we simultaneously evaluate and maximize cotton cleaning, then we can learn scientifically how to produce the best cotton as a raw material for textile processing. So the message to the cotton industry is clear: we must give more attention to technology for the measurement, analysis, and especially the mitigation of fiber breakage in all phases of our cotton breeding, production, and ginning systems. Damage is encoded in the FLD because breakage changes FLD and, therefore, is detectable in FLD. Instruments that measure FLD (such as AFIS) can be trained to evaluate the degree of damage to cotton fiber length. A big question for utilization researchers will be to determine whether classing instruments (HVI) also can be trained to perform this same type of breakage analysis. Production researchers need to learn how to reduce cotton's susceptibility to breakage. Regardless of the tools used to accomplish this survival task, fiber breakage must be expunged from all phases of production and utilization processing of American cotton.