2024-10-07 22:01:18
Cotton prices falling, with no prospects of short-term recovery. This is the reality that African cotton companies and their trading partners have been dealing with for several months.
On the cotton market, “ no one has a very clear vision », summarizes an analyst. A way of saying that for months all the actors who need visibility have been tearing their hair out. Cotton prices are in fact affected by a series of unfavorable factors.
Production was marked by a revival, BrazilTO UNITED STATES and inside Australia. The global harvest is expected to amount to just over 25 million tonnes in 2024-2025, roughly the average of the last three to four years. But production has shown great disparities, with American yields among the worst in the last twenty years, while those of Brazil – whose cultivated areas are increasing – have further increased the production of the Latin American giant, which has become the largest since the year world exporter of white gold.
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A question that has faded over the months
The other parameter that drives prices is demand, and this too has brought with it its share of unexpected events. It was initially strong at the beginning of the year, with Chinese which imported 3.2 million tonnes last season, a ten-year high, which helped avoid a collapse in prices. But in China and the European Union, another major consumer area, demand ran out and raised fears of a moribund final quarter.
This succession of good and bad news gives a strong downward trend in prices, according to Michael Edwards, director of the information and analysis site Cotton Outlook, and makes 2024 a year “ tumultuous », to use the words of Laurent Peyre, president of the French Cotton Association, the Afcotwhich held its annual forum on October 3 and 4.
Le Havre, French cradle of the cotton trade
The Afcot meeting took place, for the first time in decades, in the city of Le Havre, in the north-west of France, as if, in an extremely uncertain geopolitical context, it was appropriate to return to the origins. Those of Afcot are located right in this port city, at the mouth of the Seine.
It is here that the institution was created in 1890, on the initiative of a group of importers, and it is also the place where the Stock Exchange played an important role internationally until the Second World War in setting the prices of cotton, but also of coffee and spices and exotic woods.
It is also in Le Havre that many representatives of the African cotton industry trained at Istom, the Higher School of International Agro-Development.
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