Cotton

Yaounde, Cameroon Africa(Cameroon News) -

Cameroon cotton yield has gone up by 47 pct in ’10/11 season.

Cameroon’s raw cotton production increased by 47 percent to 161,900 tonnes during the 2010-11 season and is anticipated to move further up to 200,000 tonnes this year, as per the statistics announced by state firm SODECOTTON, who opines that the sudden rise is because of the usage of latest high-yielding plant specimens.

“The results were excellent and we’re getting back to volumes that we used to see regularly before the 2005-2009 cotton crisis,” SODECOTTON deputy head Henri Clavier said on Friday, when asked about the dip in global prices.

Cameroon has been using high-yielding Irma L 484 and Irma L 457 cotton varieties in some of the nation’s plantations in an attempt to ramp up the production o the cash crop Clavier said, also pointing out that cotton farmers were also employing better varieties of pesticides and fertilizers.

He said SODECOTTON was planning to raise the target from 185,000 to 200,000 tonnes for the 2011-12 season, but has also requested authorities to ramp up the security for cotton farmers, some of who he said had been threatened by Nigerian smugglers at gunpoint to sell off their crops for whatever price they were asking or for free.