News: Ali Eskalen /Kahramanmaraş
Nazar Tekstil, which manufactures cotton yarn in Kahramanmaraş, signed the Tübitak project to increase cotton production. The project, realized with the cooperation of university-industry, aims to encourage the production of long fiber cotton, which is completely imported, and to reduce imports in this area.
Cotton is Strategic Item
While stating the importance of Turkey as one of the most important cotton producer and consumers globally, Nazar Tekstil Board Member Nazlı Ceylan Balduk Kurtul, ‘’The strategic value of cotton in the world regions continues to increase.’’ While underlining the importance of cotton that is amongst the vital cultural plants both in terms of its socio-economic aspects and the added value it provides to the country's economy with the employment it creates in agriculture, textile and other sub-industries, Kurtul said, ‘’ Our country ranked 6th in cotton producing and consuming nations. Turkey's annual cotton production is approximately 900 thousand tons, and cotton consumption is around 1.6 million tons. It is important that Kahramanmaraş, which meets 36% of Turkey's cotton yarn production, can carry out cotton production on its own fertile agricultural land of 3.5 million square meters. For this reason, we set out our journey on this path to preserve our cotton manufacturing and to raise our own cotton that is completely domestic and not genetically modified.”
“Long Fiber Cotton is Not Produced in Turkey”
Kurtul also talked about gossypium Barbadense L, type of long fiber cotton, that does not available domestically that resulted in to manufacture cotton completely from gossypium hirsutum L type of fibers with its availability depends on domestic and foreign breeding works and said, ‘’For this reason, our textile industry forced to import extra long, very high strength, uniform and thin gossypium Barbadense L. Type of fibers.’’
While reminding about meetings with the Eastern Mediterranean Transition Zone Agricultural Research Institute before the project was outlined, Kurtul continued as follows, ‘’ As a result of our efforts, our university-industry cooperation 1505 TUBITAK project was approved. We hope that the cotton fibers obtained as a conseqeunce of our project work and the raw material we import from abroad to access quality yarn will be obtained domestically.”
“We Aim to Prevent 60 Million Dollars of Imports”
While stating that the Turkish textile industry can produce cotton yarn in different yarn counts, Kurtul said, “This difference is directly proportional to the quality of cotton fiber. With today's available data, the majority of the 6,500-7,000 tons of extra-long fiber imports made by the Turkish textile industry every year for quality yarn production from Egypt, Israel and Turkmenistan, and especially from the USA.”
Kurtul, who made an assumption on the amount of money directed at cotton imports and claimed that thanks to the project work, it will be possible to reduce 60 million USD worth of imports gradually to a minimum of zero, Kurtul, “The most important gain is that the raw material supply will be made within the country with the adoption of a sustainable model. Therefore, it is very important to access our own raw materials both for our city’s and for our country’s economy to be sustainable.’’
