CATGO Workshop Encourages Africa To Keep Its Cotton
August 23, 2013 No one can deny that the export of raw cotton fiber is critical to the economies of many African countries. The question that Egypt’s Cotton Arbitration and Testing General Organization (CATGO) asks is, “How much more economic benefit could be derived if Africa kept that cotton and, rather than exporting it elsewhere to be manufactured into textile goods, performed those value-added services at home?”
That was the main theme of a workshop CATGO recently put on, with the cooperation of the Arab Bank of Economic Development in Africa and Arab Industrial Development and Mining Organization in Morocco. Held March 28, 2013, the event took place in Alexandria, Egypt at CATGO’s International Cotton Training Centre and was attended by 16 participants from Nigeria, Gambia, Uganda, Ghana, Tanzania, Mozambique and Zimbabwe.
The workshop, entitled “The Training Workshop for Promotion of Cotton Manufacturing in African Countries,” addressed other problems facing the African cotton production industries as well, but emphasized the economic benefits of manufacturing cotton-based products in-country rather than exporting the raw fiber to other nations.
Egypt Shows the Way
The International Cotton Advisory Committee (ICAC) tracks cotton supply and use for 30 countries in Africa, and the numbers prove that CATGO’s thinking is correct. Collectively, the cotton exports of those 30 nations total 1.23 million tonnes, while their consumption totals only 330,000 tonnes – a ratio of slightly less than 4:1 (see page 28).
As large as the disparity is, those numbers don’t tell the whole story. If you remove Egypt’s exports (90,000 tonnes) and consumption (115,000 tonnes), the gap grows even more lopsided: 1.14 million tonnes of exports and a mere 215,000 tonnes of consumption, for a ratio of slightly greater than 5:1.
In fact, only two other African countries consume more cotton than they export: Ethiopia (consumes 21,000 tonnes, exports 3,000 tonnes) and Angola (consumes 1,000 tonnes and exports none).
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