Pak-China cooperation to revive cotton fields in Pakistan
Pak-China cooperation to revive cotton fields in Pakistan, Gwadar Pro reported on Sunday.
Last season, Pakistan harvested 5.6 million bales of cotton, which is the lowest point in the past 30 years.
Meanwhile, Pak-China cotton-related cooperation is in full swing. “We are mixing the advantages of China cotton and Pakistan cotton to create new cotton varieties,” said Shahid Iqbal, PhD scholar of Cotton Research Institute in Henan, China, who has been working for a Pak-China cottonseed program in Henan for 4 years.
This is one of the microcosms of the ongoing China-Pakistan cotton collaboration.
“Last year, we had to import more than 50% of cotton,” said Muhammad Abdullah, executive director of Sapphire Fiber, one of the largest textile companies in Pakistan.
He complained that low production and quality force the local industry to choose imports. “Presently, the domestic consumption of cotton is 14 million bales. However, Pakistan harvested 5.6 million bales of cotton in the last season only.” He added.
Cotton production in Pakistan is in a vicious circle. According to the research of Central Cotton Research Institute (CCRI), low production of cotton lead to the low profitability of cotton planting. Cotton farmers turn to grow sugarcane in cotton-growing areas for better income. Sugarcane plants robbed water from cotton plants and humidified the whole area.
The high humidity leads to more insects which are deadly to the cotton plants and farmers have no technology to deal with them.
What makes it worse is the climate change in the past few years, which is also weakening cotton’s strength and staple elongation. Another quality problem is the impurity which is caused by 100% manual picking.
As pickers picked the cotton, stored and transported it, contamination is entering in the cotton, which may causes spots on the final product. Kamran Razaq, cotton field supervisor of Sapphire Fiber pointed out that the impurity content of imported cotton is 4.5%, while the counterpart in Pakistan cotton is 8-9%, which is below the criteria of the textile mills.
To break the vicious circle of low cotton production, higher quality seed is the top demand, which can also help in quality improvement.
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