West African Cotton

CFA zone — hand-picked, notably clean, medium staple

The CFA franc zone countries — Mali, Burkina Faso, Benin, Côte d'Ivoire, Chad and Cameroon — produce a medium-staple cotton that occupies a genuinely useful commercial position. It is hand-picked by smallholders, which normally implies contamination risk, yet West African lint has a markedly better contamination record than most hand-picking origins because picking is done into cotton sacks rather than synthetic ones and the parastatal ginning companies enforce reasonably consistent handling. Staple runs around 1-1/8 inch with micronaire typically 3.8 to 4.4 and strength around 28 to 30 g/tex. Grades follow local naming — Kolomba, Juli, Liptako and similar marks by country — with HVI testing increasingly standard and Cotlook quoting the origin as a recognised benchmark growth.

Buy West African cotton for medium-count spinning where you want cleaner lint than the cheapest Asian alternatives at a price well below American, and where consistent medium staple rather than exceptional length is what your system needs. It has long been a staple supply into Bangladeshi, Vietnamese and Indonesian mills for exactly that reason. Two things deserve attention in a contract. Volumes are weather-dependent and the region has had sharp production swings, so a term programme wants a named ginner rather than the origin generically. And the crop is landlocked in several producing countries, moving by road and rail to Abidjan, Lomé, Cotonou or Dakar, which adds transit time and handling steps that should be built into a shipment schedule rather than discovered. CBIL brokers West African cotton against HVI classing, grade mark, staple, micronaire, strength and ginner, on FOB Abidjan, Lomé, Cotonou and Dakar, CFR and CIF terms.