PCGA wants TCP to stabilise cotton prices

SEEMA SHAFI

KARACHI: A meeting of the Pakistan Cotton Ginners Association (PCGA) was held in Karachi on Monday to analyse the latest developments on the cotton arena. The major agenda was how to stop cotton prices from declining.

Presiding over the meeting, a former chairman of PCGA and member of the provincial assembly (MPA), Abdul Sattar, urged the government to ask the Trading Corporation of Pakistan (TCP) to intervene in the market to bring long-lasting stability in the prices, so that the growers and ginners might take a sigh of relief because prices before one-year prices hit all-time high at Rs 14,000 but now the rates came down to Rs 5,300. The textile sector is the major earner of foreign exchange. If the government does not intervene in the market, how the ginners would run their business in loss? he said.

It is a fact that under the circumstances, demand for cotton is falling the world over and growers and ginners were worried about the decline in rates in Pakistan. During the current season, the country may produce over 13 million bales of cotton despite monsoon and floods in Sindh cotton belt. Despite this positive factor, exports in textile sector may not achieve desired target due to decline in foreign orders.

It is expected that a record cotton production and declining consumption will expand global stockpile, deriving more fall in the prices of this year's worst-performing commodity.

On the other hand, in the absence of basic requirements such as water, power electricity, gas supply and roads, the ginners were not able to meet the deadlines for the foreign orders. As a result, the country is losing huge foreign exchange. Leading analyst Naseem Usman said that, in fact, high cost of production during the harvesting season of cotton was causing jitters among growers. The PCGA chairman, Ammanullah Quraishi, who is in Lahore, suggested on phone that the TCP should fix the fine quality of seeds cotton at Rs 6,500, medium variety at Rs 5,500 and inferior type at Rs 4,500, Naseem said.