MULTAN, Aug 18: The Cotton Crop Management Committee has recommended increase in the strength of a couple of pesticides to improve their efficacy.

The weekly meeting of the CCMC was held here at the Central Cotton Research Institute on Saturday under the chairmanship of provincial agriculture minister Syed Khursheed Zaman.

The committee observed that syber matherin and limda poisons that were used in the making of pesticides meant to eradicate worms from cotton fields had lost their effectiveness at their current strength in the formulation.

The economically pernicious cotton leaf curl virus was missing from the meeting. The virus has once again re-emerged in cotton fields of Punjab with all its hostilities suffered by the farming community in early and mid 1990s. But the Agriculture Department wizards are mysteriously trying to overlook the menace.

Later, the Agriculture Department bureaucracy reportedly took up the issue of how to determine the lint price in line with the minimum fixed price of phutti, which is Rs800 per 40kg for the cotton season 2002-2003. But the growers’ representatives opposed the idea to work out the lint price at a time when it was being sold at a better price in the domestic market.

Talking to Dawn, some CCMG members urged that the provincial department of plant protection and pest warning should reveal why the dose of the pesticides had to be enhanced — whether efficacy of the previous strength was less than the desired, or the pests had developed resistance against this strength or the pesticide firms were manufacturing substandard products.