June 20 (Reuters) - ICE cotton futures dropped to more than
seven month lows on Tuesday as chances of bulk new crop harvest
in major growing regions and a stronger dollar kept buyers at
bay.

The most-active December cotton contract on ICE futures U.S.
settled down
0.07 cent, or 0.10 percent, at 68.97 cents
per lb.
Prices fell to their lowest since Nov. 14 at 68.51 cents per
lb and are down for the eighth straight session.

"The prospect of monsoon across India and Pakistan and
potential for big crops in the U.S. is keeping a lot of
speculative buying on the sidelines," said Louis Rose,
co-founder and director of research and analytics at Rose
Commodity Group.

Federal data on Monday showed 94 percent of cotton crops
were planted in the United States by the week ended June 18,
slightly up from 92 percent in the previous week. It rated 61
percent of the U.S. cotton crop in good to excellent condition,
compared with 66 percent week ago.

"The slight decline and slowing planting was the first
bullish supply news for the upcoming crop in a while, but it was
not sufficient to stop prices from dropping," Gabriel Crivorot,
analyst at Societe Generale in New York, said in a note.
Prices of the natural fiber were also weighed down by a
strong dollar. The dollar index was up 0.22 percent. The
Thomson Reuters CoreCommodity CRB Index , which tracks
19 commodities, was down 0.95 percent.

Meanwhile, Tropical Storm Cindy, the third named storm of
the 2017 Atlantic hurricane season, has formed over the Gulf of
Mexico, the U.S. National Hurricane Center said on Tuesday.

Cindy is expected to approach the coast of southwest
Louisiana late Wednesday or Wednesday night, and move inland
over western Louisiana and eastern Texas on Thursday, the NHC
said.

So long as an extended period of overcast skies does not
accompany thunderstorms, the rains could potentially be viewed
as beneficial, Rose said.

Total futures market volume fell by 4,966 to 22,099 lots.
Data showed total open interest fell 6,704 to 208,350 contracts
in the previous session.

Certificated cotton stocks deliverable as of
June 19 totaled 480,461 480-lb bales, up from 478,113 in the
previous session.

(Reporting by Swati Verma in Bengaluru; Editing by Chizu
Nomiyama)