July 6 (Reuters) - ICE cotton futures climbed 3 percent on
Friday, helped by concerns that dry weather in major producing
region Texas could hurt output, as the natural fiber marked its
first weekly gain in four weeks.
    * The most active cotton contract on ICE Futures U.S., the
third-month December contract              , settled up 2.49
cents, or 3.04 percent, at 84.45 cents per lb. It traded within
a range of 81.75 and 84.73 cents a lb.
    * "In the drought-stricken areas of Texas, expectation is
that
there will be little rain in July. Dry conditions will persist,
potentially causing more damage than predicted in the latest
USDA report," Gabriel Crivorot, an analyst at Societe Generale
in New York, said referring to the U.S. Department of
Agriculture.
    * The December contract saw its biggest one-day percentage
gain
since May 29. It ended the week up 0.6 percent after declining
for three weeks in a row. 
    * "This is the Friday before USDA's World Agricultural
Supply and
Demand Estimates report next week so a lot of people want to
even their positions," said Louis Rose, director of research and
analytics at Tennessee-based Rose Commodity Group. "We still
have this drought in West Texas and we continue to hear that
abandonments have been increasing quite rapidly."
    * Meanwhile, U.S. and China slapped tit-for-tat duties on
$34
billion worth of each other's imports on Friday, with Beijing
accusing Washington of triggering the "largest-scale trade war"
as the dispute between the world's two largest economies
escalated sharply.             
    * Washington imposed tariffs on $34 billion of Chinese
imports on
Friday and Beijing has said it will retaliate with punitive
measures on U.S. products - including soybeans, pork and cotton
- worth a similar amount.             
    * "Basically, the (cotton) market was too bearish (on
concerns) a
war was about to break out on the trade front ... It seems the
market has discounted it for now," said Sid Love, commodity
trading advisor at Kansas-based Sid Love Consulting.
    * The USDA on Friday reported net upland sales of 18,000
running
bales (RB) for 2017-18. For 2018-19, net sales reductions of
33,400 RB were reported. Exports of 411,600 RB were up 12
percent from the previous week, but down 4 percent from the
prior four-week average.             
    * Total futures market volume rose by 1,897 to 21,919 lots.
Data
showed total open interest fell 836 to 253,783 contracts in the
previous session.
    * Certificated cotton stocks CERT-COT-STX deliverable as
of July
5 totaled 31,351 480-lb bales, down from 92,135 in the previous
session.


 (Reporting by Eileen Soreng and Vijaykumar Vedala in Bengaluru,
editing by G Crosse)