This year’s rain is creating problems for many cotton producers in the Texas Panhandle. The weather this year has brought more rain and when there’s too much rain in consecutive days it can damage cotton crops.
“Everything that can go wrong with too much rain has gone wrong,” said Jerrell Key, General Manager of Adobe Walls Gin LP.
Having inked contracts at much higher rates earlier, importers here are staring at a loss.
The continued stand-off between the US and China over trade tariffs has created uncertainty in the Indian cotton market. After international cotton prices slipped by over 16 per cent over the past month, Indian cotton importers are staring at a loss and are looking to rework import contracts.
China has started showing interest in buying United States cotton, based on discussions during the April 12 meeting of the Plains Cotton Growers (PCG) Advisory Group.
There have been positive signals regarding movement of U.S. cotton to China in anticipation of a trade deal between China and the United States.
“Demand for cotton is there,” stated one merchant at the meeting.
The Mzannar family’s 300-year-old textile business survived Lebanon’s civil war by making uniforms for militiamen. But its business savvy was no match for years of economic malaise that followed and it has now shut its factory.
The head of Lebanon’s chamber of commerce chief said last year nearly 2,200 businesses had closed, warning that more would collapse. And while there is dispute over those numbers, Lebanese mostly agree the economy is in dire shape.
The CCI has started arrangements for ginning and storage of cotton for the ensuing harvesting season. The central government had newly lifted the MSP on medium-staple fibre cotton by 28% to Rs 5,150 per quintal and long-staple by 26% to Rs 5,450. Traders expect that the hike would help firm up prices in India compared to the last season, when those were lower compared with the global market.
Cotton analyst Naseem Usman said a spell of monsoon rains in Sindh could help growers to go for cotton sowing again in many areas and compensate earlier losses. The world leading cotton markets also maintained an rising drift, with Indian cotton gaining INR100 more to INR 46,600 per candy (356 kg).
New York cotton also recorded modest profits while Chinese cotton closed steady.
The closing stock of cotton for 2017-18 would be around 49.81 lakh bales which is quite adequate for the textile sector to smoothly run their units throughout the year, the body said. The Cotton Association of India (CAI) in second week of June increased it’s May estimate of the cotton crop production by 5 lakh bales to 365 lakh bales for 2017-18 season (October to September).
The Indian Cotton Advisory Board has marked cotton production on the higher side this year at 39 million bales compared to 36.5 million bales last year while the total demand for cotton this cotton year is pegged at 40.1 million bales compared to 38.4 million bales last year.
Due to improved quality of the seeds, India’s average cotton yield in 2013-14 has increased by nine percent to 565.36 kg per hectare (ha) despite the area under cotton dropped to 11.73 million ha compared to 11.98 million ha in 2012-13.
