NEVER before in the history of the cotton trade history of Pakistan a sustained campaign was launched to produce quality and contamination-free lint as under the present government.

The pioneering role in this national drive is, of course, being played by the Export Promotion Bureau whose high-ups have gone an extra mile since the last season to highlight the financial benefits of producing quality product.

Ginners were the first to pick up the official signals. In addition to penalizing the growers for supplying adulterated seedcotton (phutti) after deducting a quality allowance of 2.5kg per 40kg, they chalked out a plan to go modern as far as the processing operations are concerned.

What will be the savings on the quality drive is pretty hard to assess at this initial stage but ginners think that a substantial part of the Rs.35 billion quality losses will be recouped beginning from the current season.

Most enterprising among them were quick enough to place urgent import orders with the western world for the most modern ginning machinery, while frequent warnings to the growers to work under the specific picking and storing guidelines considerably improved the quality of phutti reaching at the factory gates.

Who other than the industrialist Commerce Minister, Razzak Dawood could fathom the role of cotton in the entire economy.Its share in export is more than 60 per cent; textile industry is the largest employer of the workforce, and more than 70 per cent of the rural population thrives on it.

But its fullest potential to add to the national income was never realized. This time seedcotton pickers, growers and the ginners were instructed to strictly follow the official instructions at their respective handling stages as any deviation from any one from the constituents could upset the end-result.

Reports originating from the lower and central Sindh cotton belt where the picking and ginning operations are said to be at the peak level, indicate that the quality standard are being maintained in line with the specifications.

An attractive bait of Rs75 and 200 per bale offered by the spinners for each quality lint bale has certainly worked as ginners are trying to meet the broad specifics to get the premiums offered by the spinners.

Ginners appear to have taken the official message in the right spirit and have launched an ambitious expansion-modernization programme after having worked with obsolete machines for the last many decades and have decided to enter into the sophisticated phase of processing of seedcotton to produce contamination-free quality lint for the world export markets.

An idea of scramble for the new modern ginning machinery may well be had from the fact that progressive ginners have imported latest version of the cotton processing plants from various countries and some of them have already started production.

“The last year’s import bill on this head swelled to Rs163.4m from Rs14.77m, which eloquently speaks of the ginner enthusiasm to go modern just in one go”, an official of Pakistan Cotton Ginners Association (PCGA) the apex body of ginners and traders, said.

“We won’t sell the existing ginning plants after replacing them with the modern imported ones to some of the Central Asian States some of which have invited us to set up units there on joint venture basis”, he jokingly replied to a question” what they will do with the old units”.

He says ginners may not match the modernization programme of Rs55bn launched by the textile sector over the next five years, they will certainly try to supply them contamination-free lint to add further value to the end-products.

Indications are that most of the 1,800 ginners,having their own processing facilities will, over the next couple of years, opt for modern ginning units, he hopes.

Meanwhile, private sector exporters as well as TCP have already entered the export market at an early stage and have made forward deals for about 45,000 bales in addition to TCP’s international tender for 10,000 bales.