MULTAN City News

Punjab likely to miss cotton production target

From Our Correspondent

MULTAN: The province is likely to miss cotton production target this year due to different reasons, including harsh weather and pest attack, said Kisan Ittehad chairman Khalid Khokhar.

Talking to The News here on Monday, he said that the province had so far produced 5.5 million cotton bales against the production target of 10.5 million bales while the season was almost over. He said that the pest attack destroyed genetically modified cotton varieties. He said that the government had introduced genetically modified seed varieties some years ago against the pest and virus attacks, but the pests, particularly pink bollworm, had developed resistance against GM seed varieties. He said that pink bollworm and whitefly had severely attacked the crop in Sindh and Punjab. Moreover, the climate changes also affected the cotton crop, he added. He said that the last year’s low cotton price was another reason for decline in the cotton production.

The agriculture experts said that low cotton price and prolonged wheat harvesting caused significant decline in cotton sowing. They said that the heat wave caused severe flowers shedding in the cotton crop areas, which resulted in decline in the production.

The agriculture officials said that the Federal Committee on Cotton had fixed 15.49 million bales of cotton from 3.12 million hectors cotton area. They said that the Cotton Crop Assessment Committee (CCAC) reported earlier that Punjab was projected to produce 10.5 million bales from six million acres. However it missed the sowing target and grew cotton on 5.6 million acres, registering a decline of about six per cent. The Punjab was assigned the target of 10.5 million bales from 2.43 million hectors, Sindh 4.4 million bales from 0.65 million hectors, Balochistan 0.59 million bales from 0.043 million hectors and Khyber Pakhtunkhwa was assigned the target of producing 0.00152 million bales from 0.0005 million hectors, the officials said.

Meanwhile, talking to The News, Punjab Agriculture Information Assistant Director Naveed Asmat Kahloon said that no inquiry had been initiated to probe the factors behind missing production target and pest attack on cotton bowls. He said that the government was committed to protect the farmers at all levels.