LAHORE: Pakistan records over 4.6 million bales of cotton production during the calendar year 2022 against more than 7.3m bales produced during the previous year, a massive shortfall of 37.23 per cent.

Market observers put heavy monsoon rains and river floods, which washed away standing crops, particularly in the cotton belts of Sindh and Punjab, as the main reason behind the decline in cotton yield.

Both provinces could not also meet the cotton sowing target as the crop had been planted only on 2.01m hectares against the target of 2.53m hectares this season.

The data released by the Pakistan Cotton Ginners Association (PCGA) on Tuesday revealed that 4,612,687 cotton bales arrived by Jan 1, 2023, while the figure stood at 7,312,537 bales on Jan 1, 2022. The white lint output even fell short by 0.2m bales than the estimates of 4.8m bales made by the industry a month ago.

Bridging supply gap through import seems difficult amid shortage of foreign exchange

Cotton arrivals in Sindh have been reported at 1,850,400 bales this year against 3,508,602 bales last year, a decline of around 47pc. The drop in output in Punjab has been estimated as 28pc as the province harvested 2,762,287 bales this year as compared with 3,838,808 bales last year.

This means the country will need to import more than 9.4m bales of cotton to meet the demand of 14m bales of the local textile industry as per the estimate of the All Pakistan Textile Mills Association (Aptma). Whereas the foreign exchange reserves position is so weak that letters of credit (LCs) of even the pharmaceutical industry are not being opened.

In a letter to the prime minister on Dec 23, Aptma leaders warned that the textile industry was already working at less than 50pc of its installed capacity and a large number of workers had already been retrenched and many more employees would lose their jobs if immediate steps were not taken to keep the textile units running.

They held the unavailability of lint, liquidity crunch and energy shortages as the reasons behind falling textile exports.

Concerned about falling local cotton production, Aptma is already approaching the countries, including the USA, China, Brazil and Turkiye, which have developed new cotton varieties with better yields to improve the local cotton seeds. It is also establishing a ‘cotton secretariat’ for focused work on the crop.

Published in Dawn, january 4th, 2023