Despite devastating impact of tsunami, Indonesia and Thailand's textile industry was intact and the two countries were buying more raw cotton from Pakistan, exporters said. Private sector has contracted for export of 800,000 bales and expect to export about 2 million bales, which could add about 300 million dollars in the country's total exports, said exporters.
Exporters said that while Thailand and Indonesia were badly hit by the tsunami and hundreds of thousands of people were killed or injured, cotton industries in these countries were intact.
"The two countries, beside Bangladesh, are importers of Pakistani cotton and are famous for textile production," said an exporter at Karachi.
Officially, Pakistani private sector has shipped about 450,000 bales, while they contracted for 800,000 bales.
"Though major portion of cotton were sold to Bangladesh, yet Indonesia and Thailand might increase their import because of possibly rising demand of textile products in their own markets," said Jamal Khan, an exporter.
As Pakistan has received record production of cotton and might touch 14 million bales by the end of the season, it has enormous space to export the raw cotton abroad.
Last year, Pakistan exported negligibly small quantity of raw cotton as it could produce about 9.7 million bales.
"We have chance to export about 2 million bales if the world market behaves normal and nothing extraordinary happens in the next three months," said a member of the Karachi Cotton Association.
If the country succeeds to export 2 million bales it would add over 300 million dollars in the exports helping the country to achieve exports target, which is 12 percent higher than the last year.
The Trading Corporation of Pakistan has so far contracted for 2.428 million bales but still not able to sell in the market. The TCP said it would export whatever it buys from the ginners.
If the TCP also succeeded to export 1 to 1.5 million bales, the total export could touch 500 million dollars, which would help the country to balance out the increasing import of food items. The government has imported some 2 million tons of wheat, 250,000 tons of urea along with higher import of edible oil. Further, the government is under stress of increasing balance of payment problem mainly contributed by higher petroleum prices and increasing food items imports.
"The record high cotton yield is a gift from the heaven as we have been facing acute shortage of water ranging from 40 to 47 percent," commented a cotton analyst.
Most of the exporters said the quality of Pakistani cotton was an additional help for the exporters. "The high quality of cotton made it easy for us to market the cotton at a reasonable prices," he said.
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