KARACHI, Jan 8: Cotton crop size this season has been assessed at 10.4 million bales ex-farm by the Cotton Crop Assessment Committee (CCAC) of the Pakistan Central Cotton Committee (PCCC).

The meeting was held on Monday at the PCCC. It was chaired by M Shafi Niaz, adviser to the chief executive on food, agriculture and livestock and attended by the officials of concerned public and private sector organizations.

Taking stock of the situation and the assessment made by the provincial governments as well as other stakeholders, the committee unanimously agreed to a possible crop size of 10.4m bales on ex-farm basis this season with Punjab producing around 8.1 million bales, Sindh 2.2m and Balochistan 0.1 million bales.

The committee, on the advice of the provincial agriculture departments, maintained this year’s cotton area sown at 3.125 million hectares as against the federal committee on agriculture’s target of 2.56 million hectares and the last year’s area of 2.93 million hectares, thereby showing an increase of 22 per cent over the earlier envisaged target and around 7 per cent over the last year.

The PCGA informed participants of the meeting that the seed cotton arrivals by Jan 1, 2002 were of the order of 7.853 million bales as against 8.601 million bales recorded by the same date last year thus showing a shortfall of 8.7 per cent.

The provincial break-up, however, indicated that the arrivals in Sindh were higher by 5.38 per cent, but these were lower by 12.48 per cent in Punjab.

The textile mills had purchased 5.547 million bales till Dec 31, 2001. The unsold stocks available with the ginners were reported at 2.181 million bales as against 1.743m bales of last year.

It was observed that due to foggy weather, particularly in Punjab, the flow of arrivals by end December were affected. Also, on account of the recent decline in seed cotton market prices sufficient quantities were still lying with the farmers and the middlemen.

The committee was also informed that due to fog the moisture content in cotton has increased and, therefore, the ginneries are reluctant to buy cotton from the farmers.

It was felt that the provincial extension services were required to eliminate the chances of carry-forward of the pink bollworm and army worm larvae to save the next crop. Consequently, the committee realized this could only be achieved by burning the cotton sticks so that larvae could be killed.