PUNJAB’S plan to revive its cotton area and production to its historical level this season seems to be running aground. Normally, the province cultivates cotton on 6m acres, harvesting around 10m bales.

Over the last few years, however, the acreage has dropped sharply and hit a historically low of 4.3m acres. Last year production fell to 6.9m bales, which alarmed the officials, industrial and farming sectors.

Punjab made a serious effort to restore the crop output to the previous record level in a single year — 6m acres and 10m bales. The basis of this optimism, as stated by the officials, was the price recovery of around 25pc over the last year and a plan to combat — what had become a limiting factor — the pink bollworm attack on the crop.

The province banned sowing before April 15 in order to break the life cycle of the pest. It was thought that the price recovery will bring the acreage back and pest control help restore production to its historical level.

The debate now in the province is that whether both these factors can provide a sound basis for such a recovery plan.

However, the climate, which has always been of crucial importance to cotton, has started becoming unfavourable even before sowing. The water stress is making sowing even harder.

According to the Indus River System Authority, the current shortages are over 40pc and would persist right up to April 15 before they start declining, slowly

The climate change is unprecedented. The usual March temperatures are absent; first half of the month brought a cold wave like February, and its last two weeks had high temperatures (close to 40oC in the plains) normally experienced in late April — setting in the summer season much earlier.  

With this change arrived the massive water stress. Though early kharif is normally the leanest period anyway, the late March and first two weeks of April are going to be exceptional for water shortages.

Both dams hit the dead level on March 10, leaving the entire irrigation requirements to run off the river supplies.

According to the Indus River System Authority, the current shortages are over 40pc and would persist right up to April 15 before they start declining, slowly.

The scale of this shortage was not foreseen. Otherwise, the province could have held its horses. In order to ensure the ban, Punjab ploughed up around 200 acres and booked over 60 farmers violating the ban in March.

This ban has squeezed the sowing period by almost two months with water not available now — when it is most essential for land preparation and sowing.

The emerging scenario is thus threatening the official revival plans. Both, the farmers and planners, now believe that the province would miss the acreage target by a huge margin — possibly 1m acres, if not more.

Can a single year’s marginal improvement in price pull the farmers back to cultivating cotton and become a basis for such over-optimistic targets? Land gone to crops like cane (around 2m acres) is locked for the next three years and cannot be retrieved regardless of any incentives.

Cotton production is a result of multiple factors — staring from seed, management, pest control, weather and marketing. Thus, planning and projecting production on rigorous pest control or price factor hardly makes sense.

Though conceding the over-optimistic content of the targets, officials maintain that targets are supposed to be like that. They are kept high to gear efforts for better outputs. The current targets should be taken in the same spirit and be appreciated, they say.

Published in Dawn, Economic & Business, April 3rd, 2017