AUSTRALIA: China buys up cotton
AUSTRALIA: China buys up cotton

AUSTRALIA: China buys up cotton

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Australian Cotton Shippers Association chairman, Roger Tomkins

Australian cotton exports to China and Vietnam are beginning to rise.

Chinese imports of Australian cotton continue to strengthen despite (or perhaps as a result of) the continuing chatter of trade wars.

Those who attended the Australian Cotton conference this year, and were lucky enough to listen to Michael Every’s presentation on what he was calling the Cold War between the USA and China, may remember he stated that Australia could not continue to sit on the fence on this matter and that we must pick a side. It is with this in mind I believe it is timely that we review China’s importance to the Australian cotton industry.

If you are skim reading this article then the key statement is that China is back.

The export data as depicted below demonstrates that China is once again the big daddy of buyers of Australian cotton.

While yet to reach the heady heights of 2012, just over 50 per cent of the 2018 Australian cotton crop shipped to date was bound for China. If you include the consumption of Chinese owned mills operating in Vietnam this figure then rises to closer to 70pc of the crop.

Calculating these figures was made a bit harder for us given our primary source of data is generated by the Australian Bureau of Statistics, who unfortunately bent the knee to an unknown party and agreed not to specifically provide data for exports of raw cotton to China and Indonesia.

In providing this opinion of current export estimates we have considered the relative volumes of cotton exported to various markets over the last decade and drawn on outside market intelligence.

Source: queenslandcountrylife.com.au

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