African cotton producers need to improve output and raise quality to compete in the world market, an industry official said Friday. Gerald Estur of the International Cotton Advisory Committee told the US Beltwide Cotton Conference the productivity gap between African and world cotton producers was widening.
African cotton farms rely heavily on rain, rather than irrigation, and are heavily labour-intensive, using mostly women to hand-pick the cotton bolls, he noted.
Estur said African producers must raise productivity and the manual picking of its cotton plants is a restraint to that. They could also use biotechnology to raise the output of their cotton plants, he said.
The Africans must also eliminate contamination by other materials in its cotton products by emulating the effort by countries like Zimbabwe in this area.
Estur said they should also explore the devaluation of their currency, which is currently tied to the euro, because it does not make sense for them to have a strong currency when they are trying to compete in world export markets, where cotton is priced in dollars.
They should also develop price risk management tools to reduce the risks they take in planting and selling cotton.
Estur added the Africans should continue fighting agricultural subsidies, but it was not enough to blame those agricultural payments for their woes in cotton farming.
The ICAC estimates that the 11 African cotton producing countries produced around 4.6 million (480-lb) bales of cotton this season, with 97 percent of the crop exported.
The US Department of Agriculture estimated in its monthly production report last month that world cotton output in 2004/05 (August/July) will reach 114.02 million bales.
The Beltwide Cotton Conference is the biggest annual meeting of the US cotton industry.
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