COTTON and its products play a key role in Pakistan’s economy as they account for around 60 per cent of the overall exports. But the textile sector has been plagued with the issue of contamination for decades which is one of the major reasons for falling exports.
Contamination is any impurity in cotton which affects crop appearance, value addition, ginning, spinning, dyeing, etc.
Some experts believe that contamination — which may take place at farm level during picking and storage, during transportation, marketing or at ginning level — causes a loss of at least Rs12 billion to growers as it is sold cheap in the market.
In Punjab, which produces around 80pc of the country’s cotton, the picking is done manually by women. The best thing about the tradition is that a large number of rural women get jobs. More than Rs5bn is paid to the pickers at the rate of Rs8 per kilogram of picked, clean cotton.
The flip side of the practice is that these women are untrained and the biggest source of contamination. To collect the produce, they use plastic bags or their silk dupattas, whose threads mix with cotton to become an impurity during spinning and dyeing. Their hair fall causes another impurity during all these subsequent processes. A number of other things like pieces of leaves, immature and empty balls, stems, flowers, sticks and weeds, trash and dust also get mixed with cotton.
Experts believe that impurity in cotton causes a loss of at least Rs12 billion just to growers as the produce is sold cheap in the market
Punjab is now considering a plan to train growers and provide them with grey cloth for picking and transporting the produce. Under the plan, the agriculture department will train at least 416,000 women cotton-pickers well before the start of the picking season.
“We’re selecting 20 women master trainers for each of the 11 districts in the main cotton belt (south Punjab),” a senior official of the department says. “These women, all from the department, will try to train at least 416,000 pickers by Aug 15.”
It will be one-day training on precautions a picker should take before entering a cotton field. The trainees will also be offered special cotton cloths for free to collect the picked produce instead of using dupattas or plastic bags.
Source: www.dawn.com/news