By Keith Brown, DTN Contributing Cotton Analyst 

The cotton market ended Tuesday with three out of four old-crop contracts months settling at limit up. In fact, synthetically, that is employing the options, and the market could open 1.25 cents higher Tuesday night. Speculators and Mills’ on-call fixation buying continues to undergird prices.

Also, supporting the market is the slow-developing harvest for the U.S. Delta and the Southeast. Currently, both of those regions lag on their historical gathering pace as unwanted rains are slowing harvest activities. The current weather forecast has rain across the South for the next few days.

This Thursday. USDA will update its weekly export-sales information. Last week, sales were a stout 512,000-bales sold, but shipments were off. Some analysts attributed the slow export pace to the container shipping crisis gripping the world.

U.S. Trade Representative (USTR) Katherine Tai, on Monday, delivered a speech outlining the Biden administration’s policy toward its trade relationship with China. As it stands, the imposed $350-billion tariffs on Chinese goods will not be removed, but Tai announced that the U.S. will bring back an exclusion process to help with the impact problems that several U.S. companies are suffering due to the tariffs.

From the agricultural side, the USTR and USDA Secretary Tom Vilsack talked of making sure that China lives up to terms of the phase-one agreement. Currently, it is thought China has purchased only about 60% of its original commitments of U.S. agricultural commodities.

For Tuesday, December settled 108.93 cents, up 4.00 cents, March ended at 106.59 cents, plus 4.00 cents and December 2022 ended at 87.37 cents, 1.48 cents higher; estimated volume was 32,398 contracts.