The cotton sector will start sowing for the new 2023-2024 season at the end of May.
During the 2022-2023 season, the cotton sector was compromised by an invasion of jassids, insect pests of the cotton plant, which caused enormous damage to almost all the country’s cotton plots.
It is in this context that the Minister of State, Minister of Agriculture and Rural Development, Kobenan Kouassi Adjoumani, unveiled the target price for the 2023-2024 cotton season at a press conference on Wednesday 24 May 2023.
The purchase prices of seed cotton for the 2023-2024 season are set at “310 CFA/Kg, 1st choice seed cotton and 285 CFA/Kg, second choice seed cotton,” Mr. Adjoumani said, adding that “these prices are the highest of all cotton producing countries in the sub-region.”
According to Mr. Adjoumani, the cotton crop in Cote d’Ivoire has been “more impacted than almost all the countries in the sub-region that produce cotton (which) have all lost more than half of their cotton production.” These countries are Burkina, Mali, Senegal and Togo.
For the 2022-2023 season, the country has recorded a sharp drop in average yield from 1,134 kg/ha in 2021-2022 to 574 kg/ha in 2022-2023, a level never before reached by the sector. In addition, this has resulted in a collapse in seed cotton production, which has fallen from 539,623 tons in 2021-2022 to 236,183 tons, a loss of 54 percent.
Faced with this extremely worrying situation, urgent actions have been taken by the Ivorian government and the sector’s stakeholders to limit the damage. In this impetus, the ministry in charge has sent a mission to make a diagnosis on the ground.
Based on the analysis of these findings and the impact assessments carried out by the sector, the Presidential Council of January 18, 2023 granted financial support of 34.52 billion CFA francs to buy back the input credits backed by the loss of production caused by jassid attacks.
This exceptional support is in addition to a subsidy of 28.5 billion CFA francs granted by the government at the beginning of the season to curb the increase in the price of fertilizer sold to producers.
This brought the government’s support for the cotton sector to 63.02 billion CFA francs for the 2022-2023 season.
The government is optimistic, forecasting 400,000 tons of seed cotton for an area of 400,000 hectares based on an average yield of one ton per hectare. This projected production would be 69 percent higher than in the 2022-2023 season.
Taking into account the continuing high prices of inputs, namely 562 F/kg for NPK, or 28,100 FCFA per 50kg bag, and 541F/kg for urea, or 27,050 FCFA per 50kg bag, the Ivorian government has decided to subsidize producers.
This subsidy is 200 CFA francs on each kilogram of NPK and urea, or 10,000 CFA francs per bag of fertilizer. This represents a total commitment of 28.05 billion CFA francs, Minister of State Kobenan Kouassi Adjoumani said.
This effort made by the government, he said, has enabled cotton producers to buy a bag of NPK at 18,100 CFA francs instead of 28,000 CFA francs and urea at 17,050 CFA francs instead of 27,050 CFA francs. Insecticide prices have been maintained at 33,000 CFA francs per hectare for the six conventional treatments.
AP/fss/abj/APA