Increased demand will cause the purchase price of cotton to rise in China this year, the National Development and Reform Commission said Wednesday.

The acreage sown to cotton in China has shrunk by 10 percent this year after many farmers, lured by last year's soaring grain prices, abandoned cotton for cereal crops, according to a report of the commission's Price Monitor Center.

As the global textile quota ended Jan. 1 under the World Trade Organization rules, China's textile machines have been put into high gear and eat up a lot of the cotton supply, said the report.

In the world market, cotton price is higher than the domestic price at the moment and has been on the rise.

The commission called on local governments to map out measures guiding farmers back to cotton fields and help them to raise the per-hectare cotton yield.

Over the past years, the rapid development of the Chinese textile industry has led to growing demand for cotton. China produced a record of 6.32 million tons of cotton last year, up 30.1 percent over the previous year. But huge gap between supply and demand still exists and has to be filled with imports.

Source: Xinhua