ISLAMABAD, 27 October 2003 — It’s an eight billion dollar question in a country where cotton is king. It involves Pakistani textiles that are nearly two-thirds of the country’s total exports.
The threat, at least to part of these exports, ironically, comes from a domestic source — tiny pests and worms. The entire chain of cotton growers to ginners, textile industry, traders, and exporters and the national Parliament thrown in, are now up in arms against the government. The charge is that its alleged inactivity to kill what, interestingly, is called the “army bollworm” because the pests attack cotton plants and move together like military formations, and the “American worm.” Government denies the allegation of apathy, and letting multinationals to import and supply inadequate and even spurious drugs to spay the cotton fields to kills pests.
Pakistan is one of the four biggest cotton producers, alongside United States, China and India. In normal crop years, it exports considerable quantity of raw cotton. But this year it may have to import, instead.
As of now, there is a gap of 4.6 million bales in global cotton output and consumption. It has hiked the prices and forced textile-producing countries to ponder where to import from. This is inspite of the fact that the global production rose from 88.45 million bales in 2002-03 to 92.8 million bales in 2003-04. However, the consumption, at the same time, rose too, from 95.69 million bales to 97.4 million bales.
Pakistan is generally described as “a one-item economy”: Cotton. That is its life blood, because of the preponderance of this crop which goes on to produce yarn, textiles and a host of value added products. Textiles are the country’s biggest labor employer and tax provider. Textiles exports in fiscal 2003 were $7.17 billion, out of overall exports of $11 billion.
Textile exports in the current fiscal 2004 are projected at $8 billion plus, out of the overall exports of $12.1 billion. The projection for 2005 is $10.12 billion. Even in the first quarter of fiscal 2004, textiles exports were $1.967 billion — a hefty 66.50 percent of overall exports. This is the most — perhaps the only — vibrant industry that alone has invested $4 billion over the last two years. Of this, $2 billion was spent on imported machinery from Japan and Europe. The investment was made in order to gear it up to face the challenges of WTO from January 2005.
In order to meet those challenges, the government and the industry have decided to establish three “textile cities” at Karachi, Lahore and Faisalabad. The textile city at Karachi will focus on dying, processing, finishing and high value-added sophisticated modern products for export. It will have modern infrastructure to reach its goals. Pakistan was looking forward to a bumper cotton crop of 10.5 million bales, with the strong probability of the quantity going up further.
The first picking, around 20 percent of the crop has been reasonably good, the second is underway, that will be followed by the third in the next few weeks. But, untimely, massive and un-needed rains hit the standing crop soon after mid-August and continued into September.
It devastated a large part of the cotton belt stretching from Southern Punjab province to Sindh. Makhdoom Syed Ahmad Alam Anwar, member of the National Assembly, and a veteran cotton farmer from the cotton belt’s heart of Rahim Yar Khan, forced the Parliament to debate what he calls “the calamity” caused by pest devastation.
