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G. Gurumurthy

Coimbatore , May 17

SEEDED cotton output this summer in Tamil Nadu is poised to touch three lakh bales, up from the normal yield of around 2.5 lakh bales.

The higher summer cotton production is expected to aid the State's total seeded cotton yield for the 2004-05 season to breach the annual yield of five lakh bales, according to sources in the cotton trade and the ginning industry.

They said that apart from the conducive agro-climatic conditions in the wake of improved rainfall, the widespread planting of Bt cotton in many areas including the rice fallow regions has enabled the State to record the higher yield this year.

The contract farming model practiced in certain cotton tracts too has enabled the rise in the cotton acreage in November-January sowing, the sources added.

Tamil Nadu's annual cotton crop hovers between 4.5 lakh bales and five lakh bales; very rarely has the annual output surpassed five lakh bales.

Last year, the summer crop production remained low at 1.75 lakh bales.

"We anticipate a huge crop to hit the principal summer cotton production centres in Konganapuram, Erode, Salem, Paramakudi, and Thanjavur this season, but our worry is the low prices prevailing in the market," a trade source said.

"Added to this is the problem of high degree of moisture in the seeded cotton, which would further dampen prices."

Bulk of the harvesting of summer cotton happens between end-May and July-end.

Among the principal cotton varieties sown this season are MCU-5, LRA, Bunny and RCH, whose harvest is expected to commence in the next 2-3 weeks.

The sources said that coming at the fag-end of the national cotton season, the summer crop actually comes as a stop-gap raw material buffer for the textile mills in the State, which would have in normal course exhausted all the cotton they would have bought at the beginning of the busy cotton season between October and November from upmarkets.

Since it is available close to the consuming centres, a good portion of the cotton also finds way into the textile units in loose form.

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