Reviving Egypt’s white gold
From March to June this year Egypt’s farmers were busy harvesting the country’s white gold — cotton. With 180,000 feddans cultivated, most of the harvest, reaching 1.2 million qantars, was long-staple cotton.
The Agriculture Ministry’s cotton committee had initially forecast this year’s harvest to be around 1.5 million qantars, with each feddan providing eight qantars on average.
Over the past two years the area cultivated with cotton in Egypt has been shrinking. 2018 was a successful year, and the government had bought a qantar of cotton from farmers for LE3,300 the year before, encouraging them to expand their produce the following season.
However, when it was announced in 2019 that a qantar of cotton would be bought for LE2,500 in Upper Egypt and LE2,700 in Lower Egypt, farmers cultivated less land, reaching 236,000 feddans in 2019 and 180,000 feddans in 2020.