Late rains drove Mali's 2007/08 cotton harvest down 40 percent to its lowest level for years, dealing a blow to an industry struggling with low world market prices and fears of climate change, officials said on January 28.
Landlocked, arid Mali was long the top producer in West Africa, one of a handful of key cotton growing areas around the world. But recent years have seen the former French colony's output slip below that of neighbouring Burkina Faso.
State cotton firm CMDT said the 2007/08 crop -- which has just been harvested and will be ginned and exported in the coming months -- slumped to 247,584 tonnes of seed cotton. The provisional total was 40 percent down on the 415,055 tonnes harvested the the previous year, which was in turn 20 percent down on the year before that.
Last October, as the effect of the late rains became clear, CMDT forecast that production would fall by 27 percent in the 2007/08 season, but the figures released on Monday were even worse than feared.
Few farmers in West Africa use irrigation, meaning they must plant cotton when seasonal rains arrive in order to allow the crop to develop fully in time for harvest.
"The rains set in at the end of June, early July, instead of May-June, and this late arrival led farmers to drop cotton to grow cereals," said a CMDT official.
Experts fear the late onset of the rains is no freak occurence but a sign of climate change that may in future make the growing season too short to produce a decent crop by traditional methods.
"In the Sahelian region of Africa, warmer and drier conditions have led to a reduced length of growing season with detrimental effects on crops," experts said in a 2007 report to the United Nations Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change. "In some countries, yields from rain-fed agriculture could be reduced by up to 50 percent by 2020," they said.
Scientists and farmers meeting in nearby Togo last year said the region needed to develop cotton plants requiring a shorter growing season or adapting farming methods.
Although Mali's economy has become less dependent on cotton in recent years as gold output has increased, the slump in cotton output is likely to undermine growth. Aid agency Oxfam said last year the introduction of a new cotton price mechanism combined with a 25 percent drop in cotton output could cut gross domestic product by nearly 4 percent and slash export revenues by up to$119 million.
Yet the farmers say the price offered by CMDT, a state monopoly, is so low that they run at a technical loss, only able to make ends meet by relying on family members to work for very low wages or for free. Farmers and government ministers in West Africa blame rich countries, especially the United States, for keeping world cotton prices low by subsidising output of their own farmers.
Despite bullish world prices for other farm commodities like cereals, the smallholders who grow the vast majority of Mali's cotton find it hard to switch to more lucrative crops without transport, credit, pesticides and fertiliser from CMDT.Guardian
