Spurious seeds hitting cotton yield in Sindh
Cotton seed companies allege that unregistered players in the market are selling unprocessed and spurious seed in Sindh and coupled with other factors this is damaging crop yield in the province. “Almost 80 per cent of cotton seed requirements of Sindh are being met by mostly unregistered companies, which collect rapeseed from ginning factories in Punjab and sell it in Sindh without processing leading to irreparable loss to the growers,” Matiari Seed Company chairman Nadeem Shah told the participants of a meeting held in Karachi for the revival of cotton crop in the province. The meeting was arranged by the Karachi Cotton Brokers Forum and Brokers Advisory Committee of the Karachi Cotton Association with KCA chairman Atif Dada in the chair. It was attended by proprietors of known cotton seed companies and growers. Mr Shah said: “I’m not objecting to Punjab-registered companies, though the 1976 Seed Act prohibits the company registered in one province to do seed business in the other. I desire that the unregistered players must be barred from entering the market.”