Tajik cotton fall

Tajikistan harvested 440,245 tonnes of raw cotton in 2006, nearly 2 percent less than the previous year, an agriculture official said on Tuesday.
The harvest in the impoverished, largely agricultural Central Asian State represented 80 percent of the official forecast crop, a figure that is rarely met.
Cotton is a key export revenue earner, after primary aluminium, for the country. "Due to the onset of snowfall across the whole republic the harvest has ended," Saidmurod Badriddinov, a department head at the Agriculture Ministry, told Reuters. The country exported 86,000 tonnes of cotton fibre in January-October, down from 97,300 tonnes in the same period of 2005. Latvia, Kazakhstan, Iran and Russia were the main buyers.