Cotton output falls to 21-year lows on dogmatic approaches

LAHORE: Cotton outputs in Pakistan have plunged to 21-year lows mainly due to poor seeds and lack of technology and innovations, threatening the livelihoods of growers and textile sector’s viability.

The country is going to harvest 8.5 million bales of cotton in 2020/21, according to latest official statistics. The estimate is less than even what it produced way back in 1990-91.

The least production on record if compared with the expected output was registered in 1998/99 when the country picked 8.7 million bales.

The ministry of food security attributed the low cotton estimates to poor seed quality, absence of new seed technology, heat waves and climate change, cotton leaf curl virus, pink bollworm and white fly.

Pakistan Meteorological Department said there will be dry weather for next 6 to 8 weeks.

The ministry, however, believed that the cotton sector will improve in coming years as effective measures are being taken.

The latest production estimate of less than nine million bales will awfully fall short of an estimated 16 million bales needed for domestic consumption.

Despite the fact that local textile industry consumes around 16 million bales, domestic cotton productivity never exceeded 14 million bales or so. Resultantly, the annual cotton harvest always remained below the domestic demand, necessitating the import of minimum to 1.5 to 2 million bales of cotton each year to meet the requirement of the local textile industry.

However, this year imports may touch the highest levels in the last couple of decades, putting an extra burden on current account position.

Pakistan is among the top five largest producers of cotton in the world. About 1.3 million farmers cultivate cotton in the country. Cotton and cotton products account for nearly half of the foreign exchange earnings of the country. Cotton production supports Pakistan’s largest industrial sector textile, comprising of a chain of mills, spinning factories, power looms, knitwear and garment units, ginners and oil extractors.

Despite massive reliance on cotton crops, there has been a constant decline in yield in the country due to multiple factors and no serious effort has so far been seen to revive production.

Cotton output should have been hovered around 17 million bales back in 2017/18 under a five-year plan, keeping in view the pace of growth in the crop sector, investment and policy framework.

But, the bitter truth is that we hardly produced half of what policy makers projected in 2013/14.

A study by University of Agriculture Faisalabad said it is a most worrying factor that Pakistan’s cotton production has been static since 1990/91.

In the last three decades, the only two better outputs of nearly 14 million bales in 2004/05 and 2014/15 were recorded.

The Punjab’s Cotton Crop Assessment Committee said the biggest producer of silver fiber miserably failed to harvest a decent crop as its output plummeted to mere 5.3 million bales. Punjab government attributed this to four percent decline in cotton area.

Cotton loss is also observed in Multan division. Bahawalpur and Dera Ghazi Khan are relatively doing better.

Sindh government said the crop is facing lots of issues due to heavy rains. Mirpur Khas and Sanghar also faced crop damage.

Sindh’s expected production stands at 3 million bales against the target of 4.6 million bales. Khyber Pakhtunkhwa gave target of 0.065 million bales and Balochistan had the 0.291 million bales target.