Global Cotton Industry Overview
The cotton industry is constantly striving to develop new and improved methods for producing quality products at a reasonable price
. The cotton industry continues to look toward the future at further improving their product while providing employment opportunities for millions of people in a variety of related areas.
Cotton related job opportunities can be found from the farm where the cotton is produced to the department store where the garments are sold. Cotton supports the dairy industry by providing a source of food for the milk cows.
Cotton seed can be processed to produce oil for cooking and blending with food products. Jobs can be found in the trucking and transportation industry as it is often transported thousands of miles from the cotton gins to the cotton mills, and then again to the distribution outlets.
Transforming the cotton boll through the processes of delinting and cleaning at the gin to processing at the mill for spinning and weaving fabric requires a trained labor force.
The dying of fabric and the assembly of clothing and other products can provide employment for many. High quality papers requiring cotton and paper mills employ thousands annually. The fashion industry needs trained individuals to select the proper combination of fabrics and design to market them to the public. Fashion models rely on these products in their profession. Thecotton industry continues to find new and improved uses for cotton worldwide and the public fuels continuous demand for this important commodity. With cotton having all these uses and benefits, it has certainly lived up to the name it was given years ago...."White Gold".
Cotton supports the livelihoods of at least 10 million people in West and Central Africa, where it is a typical, and often dominant, smallholder cash crop. Because it is one of the few viable cash crops in this area of Africa, developments in world markets for the fiber have major implications in the fight against rural poverty. A 40 percent reduction in price-equivalent to the price decline from December 2000 to May 2002-is estimated to imply a 7 percent reduction in rural income in Benin, a typical West African cotton pro-ducer (Minot and Daniels 2002). Cotton also has macroeconomic significance in several countries of the region, as it accounts for approximately 40 percent of total merchandise export earnings in Benin and Burkina Faso, and 30 percent in Chad and Mali. Its contribu-tion to GDP in these and other developing countries ranges from 5 to more than 8 percent.
The United Nations Food and Agricultural Organization (FAO) estimates that 100 million rural households were involved in cotton production worldwide in 2001. Among the countries in which cotton is an important contributor to rural livelihoods are China, India, and Pakistan-where 45, 10, and 7 million rural households, respectively were en-gaged in cotton production. In African producing countries, including Nigeria, Benin, Togo, Mali, and Zimbabwe, the number of rural households depending on cotton totaled 6 million.
In the early 2000s, low cotton prices, combined with high support for the sector in some of the major producing countries, brought several reactions. SomeWest African gov-ernments were forced to support their cotton growers directly from the government budget, as the price of cotton on the world market fell below the cost of producing it. In India, a minimum-price-guarantee mechanism was triggered, prompting the government to provide $0.5 billion in support in 2002. Brazil initiated a consultation process before the World Trade Organization (WTO), claiming losses to its cotton exports due to subsidies by the United States. More recently, fourWest African cotton producing countries (Benin, Burkina Faso, Chad, and Mali) have pressed through the WTO for removal of support to the cotton sector.
The importance of these issues has been widely recognized by the international community, and several strategic planning meetings have been convened by the World Bank (jointly with the International Cotton Advisory Committee), the European Commis-sion, and the WTO. In the context of the current meeting, the objective of this paper is to review the market setting and the global and country-specific policy issues, the responses to date of the significant players in the cotton market, and possible options for individual country policy-makers and international donors.
Posted by www.textilesindepth.com
by: textilesindepth
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