DUSHANBE, January 10, Asia-Plus — Tajikistan is running late with ploughing lands for cotton in 2007, Saidmurod Bahriddinov, head of the industrial crops department of the Ministry of Agriculture and Environmental Protection (MoAEP), remarked in an interview with Asia-Plus.
According to him, farmers in Sughd and the districts subordinate to the center (RRP) have to date cleared the cotton fields of ‘ghuzapoya’ (dead-standing cotton stem). The Sughd farmers are scheduled to have sown cotton on an area of 80,497 hectares this year. In the districts subordinate to the center, 21,168 hectares of farmland will have been sown with cotton this year.
In the meantime, farmers in the Khatlon province are running late with clearing the cotton fields of the dead-standing cotton stems. “They have to date cleared only 121,145 hectares of cotton fields of ghuzapoya, which is 75.1 percent of areas under cotton in the province,” the MoAEP official said, adding that 161,222 hectares of farmland in Khatlon are targeted to have been sown with cotton this year.
In all, 222,810 hectares of cotton fields in the country have been cleared of ghuzapoya so far, which is 84.8 percent of the area that was sown with cotton last year.
Meanwhile, farming units were scheduled to have completed ploughing of lands for cotton by the end of this year, while they have to date ploughed only 76,165 hectares, which is only 29 percent of lands for cotton, Bahriddinov said, adding that bad weather conditions have affected the ploughing campaign.
Like previous years, Tajikistan last year failed to fulfill its cotton target that had been determined at 547,000 tons of cotton. Cotton farms yielded 438.090 tons of cotton in 2006.
