MULTAN, Jan 28: The Farmers Vision Forum, an NGO working in the farm sector, has expressed surprise over the statement of a 'spokesman' of the Punjab agriculture department that around 200,000 bales of cotton worth Rs3.15 billion have been consumed this year to prepare quilts and pillows in the province.

In a statement, FVF chairman Khwaja Muhammad Shoaib said it was rather 'ridiculous' to claim that the farmers had utilized such a huge quantity of cotton on account of personal consumption instead of selling it to the ginners when the phutti (seed cotton) prices were at all-time high.

He said the growers had exhausted their resources on the application of pesticides to fight in futility the American, Army and Spotted bollworms. "But the department claims that the growers have made quilts and pillows with Rs3.15 billion cotton instead of covering their losses," he said.

The FVF chief said that the loss of cotton bales on account of pest attack in the province was 1.5m bales instead of what the department claimed only 0.4m bales. He said last year the province picked 7.6m bales of cotton from an area 14 per cent less than the area under cotton cultivation this year and even then the department pundits were showing satisfaction that Punjab would ultimately match the last year production against the estimated target of 8m bales. "No one can ignore the increase in area while preparing balance sheet in comparison with the last year," he added.

He also contradicted the department's claim that the cotton crop had produced exceptional results in the non-core areas of Pakpattan, Toba Tek Singh, Jhang and Sahiwal this year. He said the department claimed that its efforts this year had enabled the non-core districts to produce 0.73m bales against 0.61m bales of last year. He said as a matter of fact these non-core districts had produced 0.775m bales in the year 2001-2002 when the department had not focused to revive cotton in these areas as a major crop.

He said it was time to take stock of the reasons that deprived the country of a chance to pick a bumper cotton crop. He said the department took refuge in the weather conditions to justify the 'failure' of cotton crop this year. However, its stance also did not hold water when one looked at the five per cent increase in cotton production this year in India under the same weather conditions.