ISLAMABAD – The devastating floods in Pakistan have severely damaged the country’s cotton crop. Local reports indicate that around 40-45 per cent of the cotton crop is submerged in the major cotton production areas of Punjab, Sindh and Balochistan. This could potentially lead to a sizeable reduction in cotton output, placing further supply pressures on the global market and raising prices.
The global cotton market is already facing restricted supply due to lower crops in the US, Brazil, China and other countries this year. Indeed, in the US, agricultural forecasters expect farmers to lose more than 40 per cent of the cotton crop. According to the Wall Street Journal, “Southwestern cotton growers are abandoning millions of parched acres that they planted in spring, prompting forecasts for the weakest US harvest in more than a decade and sending prices sharply higher.”
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US agricultural forecasters expect drought-struck farmers to walk away from more than 40 per cent of the 12.5 million acres they sowed with cotton and harvest the smallest area since Reconstruction.
Damage from Pakistan’s deadly floods has now been put at more than US$10bn, the country’s planning minister said this week.
The climate change minister has called the situation a “climate-induced humanitarian disaster of epic proportions.”
“I think it is going to be huge. So far, (a) very early, preliminary estimate is that it is big, it is higher than US$10bn,” Ahsan Iqbal said.
Iqbal said 45% of cotton crops had been washed away with early wheat sowing in southern Pakistan also affected, as large swathes of land remained inundated with flood water, and severe damage to rice fields as well as vegetable and fruit crops.
Iqbal said the world owed Pakistan was a victim of climate change caused by the “irresponsible development of the developed world.”
“Our carbon footprint is lowest in the world,” he said. “The international community has a responsibility to help us, upgrade our infrastructure, to make our infrastructure more climate resilient, so that we don’t have such losses every three, four, five years.”
“Those areas which used to receive rainfall aren’t receiving rainfall and those areas which used to receive very mild rains are receiving very heavy rainfall,” he added.
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