Brazil expects record cotton crop, despite El Niño
Brazil’s state institute for the agricultural economy (IMEA) has said it expects El Niño weather patterns to have an adverse effect on productivity for cotton farmers, but it still expects a record crop for the 2023-2024 season.
Typically, El Niño conditions mean uneven rainfall patterns in the western and central regions of the country where most of its cotton farms are.
IMEA has said that, because of this, it expected productivity on cotton farms to fall to 283.45 arrobas per hectare. The arroba is a traditional Brazilian unit of measurement, equivalent to 14.5 kilos. This would represent a fall of more than 8% compared to productivity in the 2022-2023 cotton season.
However, the institute said it still expected a bigger crop overall because of an increase in the area farmers are planting with cotton now.
It said it expected a record crop in the important cotton-growing state of Mato Grosso. It said farmers there were increasingly electing to plant cotton rather than grain or soya.
In 2022-2023, Brazil’s raw cotton crop was more than 5.6 million tonnes. IMEA has said it expects the 2023-2024 crop to exceed this, reaching an estimated total of more than 5.75 million tonnes.
