ISLAMABAD, Sept 26: The cotton crop in the Southern Punjab region, one of the best quality cotton producing area in Pakistan, has been hit by sucking pest, bollworm and curl virus attack, official sources told Dawn.

Following this, the government has immediately banned sowing of all cotton varieties including BT cotton except for six highly disease-resistant cotton varieties, these sources said.

This happened at the time when cotton growing areas has already been reduced by 7.6 per cent than last year and stood at 8.8 per cent lower than the target set for the current season by the federal government.

“The incidence of sucking pest and bollworm complexes in varying proportions were reported from the cotton belt but the situation is not yet alarming,” said an official report made available to Dawn.

The report said that cotton leaf curl virus attack of low to medium intensity was noticed in Burewala, Vehari, Lodhran, Multan and Rahimyar Khan. More than 60 per cent of Pakistan’s exports are cotton based.

These sources said that the ministry of food and agriculture was in close contact with the provincial agriculture departments and was keeping a close watch on the situation to formulate a viable strategy to overcome the virus menace in this regard.

A couple of decisions to tackle the situation has been taken that include: “All cotton varieties except CIM-446, CIM-882, CIM- 473, CIM-443, FH-900 and FH-901 have been banned for cotton sowing.”

It has also been decided that only one or two new varieties would be approved in a year instead of approving a number of varieties and sowing of exotic BT cotton has been banned.

In the long run, accelerated research efforts would be made to focus on the use of bio-technology in varietal development programme and adequate funds in the form of grant are being arranged for financing the virus related projects.

The official sources, however, said that overall current crop condition has so far been satisfactory and promising. They said that overall condition revealed that if the weather and insect- pests situation do not aggravate during rest of the crop growth and development there was much likelihood that the envisaged production of 10.07 million bales might not only be achieved but surpassed despite a decline in area sown.

The report said that cotton sown areas in the current season has reduced to 2.644 million hectares against 2.862 million hectares last year. This was around 7.62 per cent lower than the last year’s and 8.83 per cent lower than 2.90m hectares target for current season.

Total production target for the current year is 10.07m bales. The production in Punjab has been estimated at 7m bales, followed by 2m bales in Sindh and 0.150m bales in Balochistan and 0.02m bales in NWFP.

The report said that seed cotton market prices since the beginning of the current season have been above the support price of Rs800 per 40 kg announced by the government.

Officials hope that the average price of seed cotton during the current season would remain above the support price level on account of the expected higher world market prices of raw cotton and the growing domestic mill consumption.