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Cotton in sentence

267 examples of Cotton in a sentence

Prices for cotton were so low last year that Madi cut his acreage.
He earned less from cotton last year than the year before, and much less than he earned five years ago.
This year Madi may grow even less cotton, even though the crop is the main source of income for himself, his two wives and his five children.
On some of his land, he now grows corn and peanuts instead of cotton.
But cotton potentially offers the best payback, because it has cash value on the international market and can be stored for long periods of time.
Like millions of other African cotton farmers, Madi has advantages over cotton farmers in other parts of the world.
A state-owned cotton company collects his cotton relatively efficiently, gins it nearby to produce lint and then sells the lint on the international market, generally paying Madi promptly and fairly.
Madi’s earnings help him keep his children in school, even at the height of the cotton harvest.
He knows his children’s future depends on better prices for cotton.
But forces beyond Madi’s control – even beyond his awareness – are restraining cotton prices, creating a global glut that is largely the result of policies followed by the world’s richest governments.
The United States government pays billions of dollars to cotton growers, mainly in California, Texas, and Mississippi.
The European Union also contributes to low cotton prices, paying farmers in Greece about $1 billion a year to grow the crop at a loss.
Such subsidies are a global scandal, yet large payments to largely wealthy American and Greek cotton growers seem likely to persist for many years.
The best chance to end cotton subsidies soon was lost last December, when African countries, aided by India and Brazil, pressed hard for the elimination of cotton subsidies, at the World Trade Organization’s meeting in Hong Kong.
The only chance to end cotton subsidies is now somehow to convince US and EU leaders to assist African peasants by curtailing payments to their own cotton farmers.
The powerful US cotton lobby wants no change in the level of payments, however.
Take away subsidies and cotton prices will rise, perhaps as much as 15%.
“There’s real money here for the individual African,” says Daniel Sumner, an economist and cotton expert at the University of California.
For Africans, however, these changes are cosmetic, doing little or nothing to lift cotton prices.
In some parts of Africa, cotton growers are expanding production, providing proof that if the US and Europe did somehow curtail their own cotton output, Africans could plug the gap.
In Uganda, where civil wars in the 1970’s and 1980’s devastated farming, cotton growers are making a major comeback.
In Zambia, cotton output is soaring.
In Cameroon, where cotton is the main source of income for nearly five million people, record crops were posted last year and the year before.
But Souley Madi is resigned to receiving unfair cotton prices, perhaps for a long time.
During the last harvest, when 100-degree heat forced him, his wives, and his mother to stop picking cotton after a few hours, he returned to his compound to tend to his ducks.
The United States is undergoing a third industrial revolution, an information-age upheaval that could be as momentous as its predecessors, which transformed society through the introduction of steam, iron, cotton, and machinery, and then internal combustion, electricity, and steel.
The introduction of GM maize, soybean, and cotton in South Africa, for example, helped raise farmers’ incomes by more than $1 billion from 1998 to 2012.
Similarly, Burkina Faso’s farmers now grow a GM cotton variety that naturally resists a destructive insect, and thus requires less expensive pesticides.
The switch from traditional cotton to the GM variety has helped increase yields by more than 18%, earning farmers $61 more per hectare and raising $1.2 billion in agricultural revenues in 2013 alone.
Slaves from Africa were used to grow cotton in the southern United States, which was then shipped to English mills.
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