Egyptian cotton in trouble
18/12/2009
Business commentators in Egypt have said that the African country’s cotton industry is in danger of extinction because of a lack of investment by the government. They said the textile sector had been overlooked amid other reforms that the authorities have pushed through.
“The market is unbalanced,” Mohamed Abdel Aziz, head of Egypt’s state-run Cotton Research Institute, has told Reuters. “The industry was neither really privatised nor left public.”
As a result, cotton acreage across the country has fallen to around 120,000 hectares, compared to 925,000 in the 1960s. Now Egyptian cotton farmers are asking for a ban on imported cotton, plus price guarantees from the state. They have also called for the US to stop subsidising cotton production there.
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