DUSHANBE, December 8, 2009, Asia-Plus — This year, Tajikistan has managed to yield 295,815 tons of raw cotton, which 51,000 tons fewer than last year, Saidmurod Bahriddinov, the head of the crop sector department within the Ministry of Agriculture (MoA), announced at a briefing in Dushanbe on December 7.
According to him, average cotton yields increased from 1.48 tons per hectare in 2008 to 1.74 tons/ha this year.
In the meantime, speaking to reported, Safar Mahmadiyev, the head of the MoA department for economic policy and forecasting, attributed the failure to fulfill the 2009 cotton target to bad weather conditions and insufficient financing. “This year, only 137 million somoni have been allocated this year to support the cotton sector instead of the originally planned 180 million somoni,” Mahmadiyev noted.
We will recall that this year, Tajik farmers were supposed to plant cotton on 200,700 hectares but due to bad weather conditions they planted cotton on only 170,400 hectares, while this year’s cotton target was determined at 350,000 tons of raw cotton.
In 2008, they planted cotton on 237,000 hectares and yielded more than 353,000 tons of cotton that was 64 percent of the target determined that at 552,000 tons. In 2007, 254,279 hectares were allotted for cotton production and farmers gathered 419,597 tons of cotton, which was 763 percent of the 2007 target determined at 547,000 tons.
According to the MoA data, more than 30,000 farming units now operate in Tajikistan and more them 21,000 of them are engaged in cotton production.
