Cotton: wither Punjab miracle?

It’s official. According to a news report by this paper over the weekend, ginning factories across the country saw the lowest volume of cotton arrivals in the past 10 weeks, putting an end to forecasts that Pakistan was set to witness record-smashing cotton production during 2023-24. The country may very well be on its way to producing the highest volume of cotton bales in the last five years, but that’s got very little to do with reasons offered in the press.

Take, for example, the endless felicitations exchanged between the Punjab government, APTMA, and the food security ministry over the past six months. From forecasts of the bumper crop to ‘decade-highest’ production by the textile association, to the federal commerce minister and chief minister of the largest province congratulating each other on a successful ‘campaign to revitalize cotton’, Punjab’s performance has little to show in numbers.

If estimates from Pakistan Cotton Ginners Association (PCGA)’s fortnightly report are anything to go by, Punjab province has witnessed the third lowest cotton arrivals in at least the past 10 years. In fact, excluding the two monsoon flood years of 2020 and 2023, this is the worst cotton performance in Punjab in a season when the crop has not been declared ‘calamity hit’ (whether due to rains, floods, drought, or large-scale pest attack). In fact, enabling exogenous environments such as favorable weather is exactly why industry insiders have been predicting a bumper crop all along since the beginning of the season.

But numbers actually show that the crop performance in the country has been pulled up primarily by record arrivals in Sindh, not Punjab. In fact, crop arrivals to date in the southern province are most certainly the highest in the last 10 years, and quite possibly in history. And so far as the funny business of predictions goes, BR Research is also in for one: the 2023-24 kharif cotton might just be the first in the country’s history when cotton production/arrivals in Sindh exceed those in Punjab!

This means that the purveyors of ‘cotton revival in Punjab’ need to be held accountable for the much-touted revival in the province. If BR Research’s forecast of provincial cotton output closing in at 4.5 million bales (of 170kg) max pulls through, this would be the worst yield per hectare performance of the last ten years, flood years included. This is despite a 13 percent rise in the area, as confirmed by the Crop Reporting Services of the province.

For at least the past three crop seasons, BR Research has earnestly been insisting that early jumps in cotton crop performance should not be read as barometers of success, as the crop sowing and harvesting cycle has been shifting backward in the calendar, which means that market-watchers may witness an abnormal growth on a year-on-year basis, but one that doesn’t mean much for the entire season. Pakistan’s cotton crop is definitely witnessing early peaking and has in fact already peaked going by the second consecutive fortnight-on-fortnight decline reported by the PCGA.