NCC Chairman dismayed at cotton industry's demand crisis
28 Sep '05
4 min read
In other words, if cotton had simply held its own in the rising world demand for fiber, world demand for cotton would be 20 percent greater than the current level – and this is on top of the 10 percent additional that the U.S. industry built through its national consumer promotion programs - he said.
Eastland said that instead of this added demand, the global cotton industry has a cotton demand crisis. While the United States has seen cotton's share of fiber consumption for apparel and home furnishings increase steadily since Cotton Incorporated's campaign gained traction in the 1970s, “every other country has seen a stagnant or declining market share.”
As an example of the promotion efforts needed today, Eastland pointed to the joint CCI /Cotton Incorporated experiment - the Cotton Gold Alliance (CGA) - which is being conducted in India. The generic promotion program, which used the Seal of Cotton to create a preference for quality products that are identified as 100 percent cotton, has been very successful. The CGA promotion has been a factor, he said, in not only a rise in consumer preference for products that bear the Seal of Cotton, but a reversal in that country of a decline in cotton consumption versus synthetics. In terms of bales, this $2 per bale program has meant about a 300,000-bale increase in offtake – an excellent return on investment, he noted.
Eastland said the hope is that the Indian cotton industry or their government will put local funding in the CGA program, now that its three-year trial period will be over at year's end.
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