BEIJING, Dec. 18 (Xinhua) -- China's cotton output ended a four-year declining streak, increasing 2.7 percent in 2017, as yield per hectare saw strong growth, official data showed Monday.

Cotton output increased 142,000 tonnes to around 5.49 million tonnes, according to the National Bureau of Statistics (NBS).

The area of cotton fields in China fell 4.3 percent year on year to 3.23 million hectares, but yield per hectare rose 7.3 percent, the NBS said.

Northwest China's Xinjiang Uygur Autonomous Region, the country's largest cotton growing area, accounted for 74.4 percent of the national total output, 7.1 percentage points higher than last year.

China's cotton output peaked in 2012 at 6.84 million tonnes, more than 2.2 times that of 1978. It started to drop from 2013 due to relatively low profitability.

Though other cotton growing areas continued to see shrinking output this year, Xinjiang posted increases in both area and yield, due to the promotion of scale production, according to Zhao Jianhua, an NBS statistician.