Coimbatore : Indian Cotton Federation (ICF) today expressed hope that supply position will be able to meet the demand for cotton at the
current spindlage in mills and prices to be steady to firm levels, as of now.

In view of the normal monsoon, higher realization compared to other cash crops, increase in MSP,the farmers have shown more interest in cotton for the year 2018-2019.  However due to pink boll worm and pest attacks the volume of crop could be around 360 to 380 lakh bales (of 170 KG), ICF President J Thulasidharan said at ICF's 39th Annual General Meeting held here.

"However, we need to leave a chance to other happenings in Agro climatic conditions," he said.

Stating that the Centre was of the view that through its doubling the income of farmers, a proposal is being mooted to have better yield through precision farming, high density farming, use of quality seeds  and inputs, he said that the Centre was planning  to have a Technology Mission-II  with  two sub-Mini Missions to deal with yield and quality .

He also highlighted the needs of the cotton sector such as close look at grading/classing of cotton, standardisation of packing as different ginners use different kind of packing for bale packing and need to have bar coding for cotton bales, need to improve irrigation system by using better conservative method, such as drip irrigation, sprinkler as in Israel with  quality water useful to cotton .

Cotton being seasonal crop liberal finance  at marginal interest should be made  available through warehouse funding system by banking agencies, he said.

Later Thulasidharan was reelected as president for the period 2018-19.

Whle P Nataraj and K N Vishwanathan were re-elected as vice presidents, Atul P Asher was re-elected at Secretary of the federation.