ISLAMABAD, Oct 31: The Trading Corporation of Pakistan (TCP) has decided to purchase premium cotton qualities (Grade-I and II) from the market to encourage farmers towards better quality and contamination-free produce.

Speaking here at a news conference, Commerce Minister Abdul Razak Dawood said the government focused more emphasis on quality cotton because it would take “us to more value addition as envisaged under the textile vision-2005”. Till last year, the corporation picked up only the grade-III cotton, he said.

The minister said that a meeting had been arranged in Lahore on Saturday to take all representatives of farmers, ginners and big textile industrialists into confidence and reassure them that prime quality produce and contamination-free cotton would be purchased by the TCP at higher rates. The contamination-free cotton, said the minister, would be given a premium of Rs200 per maund and Rs75 per maund for 2.5 gram contaminated cotton. “The season is just starting and it is the time “we assure our ginners to produce contamination-free cotton and that would be purchased by the TCP”. “I would use my influence in the large industries to buy that quality at a price fixed by the government in consultation with their representatives”, the minister said.

He said that due to contamination, Pakistan’s cotton was treated at the Liverpool Cotton Exchange as second grade and the country lost $300 million per annum because of this grading. Punjab has banned use of jute and polypropylene bags for the handling of cotton and said that human hair and plastic bags were the most dangerous contaminations.

Sugar: The minister said that Pakistan had 370,000 tons of sugar stocks at present as the next season would start from today.