Being one of the most important cotton producers of the world, Turkey’s cotton plantation zones decreased almost 50 percent in the last 10 years.
Checking the pulse of Turkish home textile market, TETSİAD remarks that the cotton production and harvest significantly decreased in the last 15 years and this decrease negatively affected the home textile industry. Turkey, which is able to produce only the one-third of its cotton demand, spends 1.7 billion dollars for cotton import, every year. President of TETSİAD Yaşar Küçükçalık, saying that Turkey is one of the most qualified cotton producers of the world, said that “Our average field productivity is in the second position after Australia which is the first country of the world and produces with genetically modified seeds, and of which field sizes and irrigation conditions are much better that they cannot be compared with our country”.
DOMESTIC COTTON PRODUCTION HAS TO BE INCREASED TO 4 MILLION TONS AS OF 2023
Stating that the industrialists, using domestic cotton, must be supported and the quality of cotton has to be improved, Küçükçalık indicates that the home textile industry, which has a great importance for the economy of Turkey and is using cotton as raw material almost at 60 percent, is also going to be reinforced as it is on the basis of this improvement. Yaşar Küçükçalık, emphasizing that the cotton production of Turkey regressed to 550 thousand tons while it was 850 thousand tons in 2002, continues: “Turkey is annual cotton demand is 1.7 million tons, and the cotton production was 550 thousand tons in the last year. In terms of productivity, quality and product variety, our country has territories which provide great advantages for agriculture and agriculture based industries. Furthermore, Turkey has a potential to take the added-value that it produces to even more significant levels, as long as it continues to increase the awareness level in the agriculture. Because of this reason, our objective must be 2 million tons in the midrange and 4 million tons as of 2023”.
