The hope-bearing cotton

The cotton area is a strategic part of the policy of Mali as regards social and economic development. The CMDT supervises more than 3 million people. The exploitation of cotton is made of 200 000 family farms, that are cultivating about 8 to 10ha per farm, including 2 to 3ha of cotton in a cereal/cotton production system. Most of these farms (about 80%) are hitching up their exploitations, and it is to be noticed that motorization is in full development, with tractors of at least 30hp.

Cotton is, before everything, the best means of development in the zone where we intervene. It ensures the massive distribution of money in the country, that is to say from 85 to 130 billion Francs CFA per year, but it also provides for 4 000 permanent and temporary jobs in the cotton society.

We must underline its constituting the main source of income of the peasants in the area, thus allowing them to satisfy, in most cases, their needs as regards goods of consumption, such as motorcycles or televisions. It helps creating country substructures such as health centres, schools, water for the animals, vaccination areas. Not to mention the lightening of the tasks of country women, thanks to individual mills and drillings bringing up drinking water, but also improved houses. It ensures the promotion of the country world with functional alphabetisation, post alphabetisation, peasant organisations such as cooperatives.

Moreover, it facilitates the opening up of rural areas thanks to the maintenance of agricultural tracks. That very cotton area, as it provides a third of the national production of cereals cultivated in parallel, helps to national self-sufficiency as regards cereals. We can put forward the profits generated by exportation (160 to 200 billion francs CFA per year, which is 30 to 45% of the total benefit). Cotton entails from 5 to 10 billion francs CFA of taxes per year for the state, and it represents from 8 to 10% of the GDP.

It is throughout the building of health centres for the rural population itself that our action can be measured as regards this very issue. During the different steps of the project names "Mali Sud" (South Mali), from 1980 to 2000, the CMDT got interested in the health issue, through the taking care of the
equipment of the doctors of the circles (administrative constituencies), as regards maintenance and transport.

The CMDT also lead campaigns of nivaquinisation (campaign named after the medicine called "Nivaquine"), throughout the "Woman and Development" issue, in order to fight against paludism. It also helped the settlement, on our area of intervention, of the first country doctors of Mali, and created the CESCOMs (centres of communitarian healthcare) which multiplied in the cotton areas.

First of all, we want to be particularly sensitive to the struggle against poverty, thanks to a good remuneration of the producers that helps improving the life quality of the people, but also to counter the rural exodus, as it is the cause of many problems of society.

We'd also wish to be the guarantors of food security through our commitment to agricultural producers and our actions as regards their techniques, the improvement of their productivity, and the fertilization of the grounds.

We are also strongly thinking about the possibility of biological cotton so that we'd seize the new opportunities of the market and would follow the experiments on fair trade. Our cotton, with the label "Cotton from Mali", will soon be one of the essential raw materials in order to industrialize the country. This is a challenge we are ready to face.