Textile mills turn to tech for traceable cotton

LAHORE: The textile industry is aiming to boost its cotton quality and output by adopting new technologies and practices that ensure traceability and sustainability, the All Pakistan Textile Mills Association (APTMA) said on Friday.

APTMA North Chairman Kamran Arshad said the association has focused on improving the quality of cotton as raw material like India and Brazil to achieve high per acre yield, traceability and sustainability.

He was speaking in an interactive session on Traceable and Sustainable Cotton Initiative with Shad Mustafa, an expert who leads the Mehrgarh Cotton project.

Mustafa briefed APTMA members on how his team has achieved better cotton production under the project, which uses blockchain, GPS and drones to monitor and record the information flow on the fields.

He said traceability has become crucial for the entry of textile products in the US, where issues like child labor and human rights violations are taken very seriously by the government.

Mustafa said his team ensured crop protection, water stewardship, soil management, bio-diversity and land use, fiber quality and decent work practices at the project. A QR code was generated from the traceability system to ensure quality of production, which resulted in lower trash content of around 7.5 percent against 9 percent in the market and higher staple length than the market average.

Mustafa said his team had engaged international insurance companies for the crop insurance in case of natural disasters, as the domestic ones had no capacity to bear the claim in case of loss. He also said they used pesticides to mitigate the losses caused by pests such as white fly, jassids, armyworms and pink bollworms.

They are planning to expand the project to larger acreage in the province of Sindh and scale up to 7,000 acres under the Special Investment Facilitation Council (SIFC).