Turkmenistan revises raw cotton crop

Turkmenistan has revised its 2010 raw cotton harvest to 1.3 million tonnes from 1.0 million tonnes, a government official told Reuters on Monday, saying that good weather was a major factor behind the higher crop. Turkmenistan, one of the world's main cotton exporters, had originally forecast its 2010 raw cotton crop at 1.05 million tonnes. The area sown to cotton totalled 550,000 hectares.
The secretive Central Asian state has so far reported no actual data for its 2009 cotton crop. Key official statistics are often unavailable, and independent economists sometimes call into question the veracity of officially published data. In 2008, Turkmenistan gathered 1.0 million tonnes of cotton, compared with 950,000 tonnes in 2007. According to the National Cotton Council of America, Turkmenistan exported 1.1 million bales of cotton in the 2009 marketing year, making the desert nation the world's sixth-largest cotton exporter.