CAI ADDS METRIC UNITS TO TABLES
A seeming mundane change in the format
of a table can have concrete consequences for industry improvement. In a press
note distributed world wide on May 13, 2013, the Cotton Association of India
(CAI) reported Indian cotton production, supply and use in traditional units of
lakh bales (100,000 bales of 170 kilograms each) and in metric tons in
side-by-side columns.
The ICAC advocates universal use of
metric measures in reporting cotton supply and use in order to promote
international transparency and market efficiency. It has been a little over 200
years since the invention of the cotton gin, and the world cotton industry has
developed as a composite of national industries with parochial systems of
evaluating quality, measuring quantities and marketing both seed cotton and
lint. These parochial systems work fine for domestic industries, but as an
industry becomes more globalized, parochial systems, including units of
measure, create opacity, not transparency. A partial list of units of measure
commonly encountered in world cotton statistics is shown below.