Burkina trims cotton forecast after late rain

Top West African cotton grower Burkina Faso has cut its 2008/09 crop forecast by almost one-fifth to 525,000 tonnes due to late rains and payment problems, the country's main cotton company SOFITEX said. The revised forecast is still well above the dismal 360,000-tonne crop last season, when the annual harvest dropped 45 percent from the previous year due to bad weather, low farm-gate prices, and rising fertiliser and pesticide costs.
SOFITEX, which harvests almost all of Burkina's cotton, announced earlier this year a target of 600,000 tonnes of seed cotton for the 2008/09 harvest, with an additional 50,000 tonnes expected to be handled by the country's two smaller operators.
"We haven't made our target for two reasons: the late arrival of seasonal rains, which scared some farmers off, and also the unpaid debts which we had hoped to settle before sowing," said Georges Yameogo, head of development and production at the country's main cotton company SOFITEX.
Most West African farmers have no irrigation, so they wait until the rains arrive before sowing crops. If the rains begin too late, there will not be a complete growing cycle before the land dries out again, so farmers often choose not to waste money and effort sowing cotton and either plant faster growing crops instead or leave the land fallow.
SOFITEX now expects to handle 450,000 tonnes of seed cotton, and an estimated 75,000 tonnes going through the other companies, Yameogo told Reuters on Sunday in the economic capital Bobo-Dioulasso.
Farmers and smallholders around Bobo-Dioulasso, south-west of capital Ouagadougou, have started harvesting the white balls of cotton in the past fortnight, and they will continue to bring in the harvest over the next few weeks.
"Despite the late arrival of the rains, we think the season has gone much better than last year. The rains have been more regular and it is still raining in some areas," Yameogo said. The average yield was expected to rise to 1,100 kg per hectare this year, from 850 kg the previous season, he said.
Farmers have received extra encouragement to plant cotton through an increase in the farm-gate price to 165 CFA francs ($0.31) per kg, from 145 CFA per kg the previous season. However, the problems paying arrears due to farmers had caused uncertainty, meaning some had reduced the area in which they planted cotton this year, Yameogo said.