DUSHANBE, December 27, Asia-Plus -- Tajikistan is running late with ploughing lands for cotton in 2007.

Saidmurod Bahriddinov, head of the industrial crops department of the Ministry of Agriculture and Environmental Protection (AoEP), remarked this in an interview with Asia-Plus today.  “Farming units were scheduled to have completed ploughing of lands for cotton by the end of this year, while they have to date ploughed only 62,891 hectares, which is some 24 percent of lands for cotton,” the AoEP official said, adding that violation of agro-technical principles of growing cotton may affect cotton yields. 

According to him, the country’s farming units have not yet decided what area will be sown with cotton next year.  “We have not yet received data from the cotton farms about areas for this industrial crop in 2007,” Bahriddinov said. 

According to him, farming units do not keep strictly to the target on areas to be sown with cotton.  “Thus, this year, Tajikistan was scheduled to sow cotton on 258,582 hectares of lands, while actually farms had sown cotton on the projected area and 4,305 hectares in excess,” the industrial crops department head noted.   

Like previous years, Tajikistan this year failed to fulfill its cotton target that had been determined at 547,000 tons of cotton.  Cotton farms have yielded 438.090 tons this year.