Aug 19 (Reuters)ICE cotton futures gained more than 2% on Friday, with persistent supply worries putting the natural fiber on course for a second straight weekly rise.
* The December contract on ICE Futures rose 2.48 cents, or 2.2%, to 115.18 cents per lb at 11:22 a.m. ET (1522 GMT).
* "The supply-demand numbers indicate that the market is going to trade at a high level for a long time to ration out supply," said Rogers Varner, president of Varner Brokerage in Cleveland, Mississippi, referring to the U.S. Department of Agriculture's August World Agricultural and Supply Demand Estimates report.
* The contract is set to gain about 6% for the week, having hit a near two-month high on Tuesday. Prices, however, settled down in the last two sessions, which analysts attributed to a technical correction and a rallying dollar.
* "Buying interest is much strong than that of sellers, with Wednesday's limit down trading quickly reversing itself by a significant margin," Louis Rose of Tennessee-based Rose Commodity Group wrote in a note.
* A severe drought and heat wave in Texas have scorched the cotton crop in the United States, the world's top exporter, while cooling demand for clothes as factory output in China slows and fears of a global recession mount could soon temper cotton prices, analysts and traders said.
* "There's two huge forces at play this year. The first force is decreasing demand and the opposing force is a sharply lower crop in the U.S.," Varner added.
* "But I don't think that the price structure will go down much until plantings next year and then perhaps midway in the summer to reflect no threat from Mother Nature."
* Total futures market volume fell by 11,566 to 11,612 lots. Data showed total open interest gained 1,212 to 198,716 contracts in the previous session.
(Reporting by Kavya Guduru in Bengaluru; Editing by Maju Samuel)