NEW YORK, March 15 (Reuters) - U.S. cotton futures finished limit down
for the second straight session Tuesday as fears over Japan's disasters and
nuclear crisis on the global economy took their toll on fiber, analysts
said.

It was the market's fifth fall in six sessions.

'Everything is in concert with Japan,' said Mike Stevens, an
independent cotton analyst in Mandeville, Louisiana. 'You've got wholesale
retrenchment in every asset class today.'

The key May cotton contract on ICE Futures U.S. dropped its
7-cent limit to finish at $1.9094 per lb, with the session top at $1.9957.

Last week, the market lost 3.7 percent, the first weekly loss for
cotton futures in 9 weeks.

Volume traded stood at 18,000 lots, over 50 percent above the 30-day
norm, Thomson Reuters preliminary data showed.

Japan, the world's third largest economy, scrambled to head off a
meltdown at a stricken nuclear plant, and Stevens said the
cost of clean-up and recovery in the country's quake and tsunami-hit areas
will hit global economies.

'This is going to be a real strain on the world's economy,' Stevens
said. 'You don't know what the repercussions are going to be, but they're
not going to be good.'

Analysts said the damage to an economy as large as Japan's will hurt
cotton demand worldwide.

Stevens raised the prospect that cotton's recent bull run could be
fundamentally altered by the triple whammy of disasters ravaging the
Japanese economy.

'All markets are seeing risk reduction and this is being driven by
fears of the unknown as the Japanese nuclear plant situation seems to go
from bad to worse,' added John Flanagan, president of brokers Flanagan
Trading Corp in North Carolina.

The next bit of information which will provide direction for cotton
futures would be the USDA's potential plantings data on March 31.

That is the first government survey of likely plantings for major row
crops like cotton, corn, soybeans and wheat in 2011. Despite the rally in
cotton, the fiber has to compete for acreage against similarly high-priced
grains this year.

Estimated volume traded Monday stood at about 16,000 lots, about 50
percent below the 30-day norm, Thomson Reuters preliminary data showed.
Open interest in the market, an indicator of investment exposure in
cotton, stood at 172,588 lots as of March 14, compared with 174,908 lots in
the previous session, data from ICE Futures U.S. showed.