Following a dip in manufacturing because the Nineteen Nineties, the federal government re-launched cotton as a precedence trade in 2016, a transfer to diversify its economic system, which is in any other case closely reliant on oil and gasoline manufacturing and exports and due to this fact susceptible to wild swings in international vitality markets.
The cotton – at this time because it was previously – is generally exported as a uncooked product to neighbouring nations equivalent to Turkey, Iran and Bangladesh to be used within the textiles trade and vogue merchandise despatched around the globe.
For hundreds of years, as a cease on the traditional Silk Highway, after which particularly all through an period underneath Russian management, cotton has been an essential financial driver for the nation.
“Cotton farming has an extended historical past. There was a saying from the Soviet period that referred to cotton as ‘white gold’, which got here after oil, often known as ‘black gold’,” stated Mr Rustam Quliyev, an officer with the Ministry of Agriculture in Imishli.
“At this time, cotton cultivation nonetheless holds nice significance for Azerbaijan,” he stated.
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The trade started to say no considerably when the USSR collapsed and Azerbaijan turned an unbiased nation in 1991, and by 2009 manufacturing had diminished to only 21,000 hectares, round 10 per cent of what it was a few a long time earlier.
Output that yr plummeted to 31,000 tonnes in comparison with 830,000 tonnes a yr within the late Eighties.
“When the Soviet Union collapsed, our scientists declared cotton farming a catastrophe for Azerbaijan, calling it a type of slave labour,” stated Mr Azer Aliyev, an Imishli-based researcher specializing in economics and agriculture.
“Nevertheless, when oil costs dropped in 2015, the federal government started looking for different sources of income, and cotton was chosen as a promising possibility. Why? As a result of cotton, in contrast to different merchandise that Azerbaijan would possibly produce, is aggressive on the worldwide market and may be offered at excessive costs on commodity exchanges, producing overseas foreign money,” he stated.
