Northwest China's Xinjiang Uygur Autonomous Region, a leading cotton producer of China, reaped 44,000 tons of colored cotton a year, accounting for 95 percent of the national total or 30 percent of the world's total.

 

Xinjiang now grows approximately 46,700 hectares of colored cotton, making the region the largest colored cotton production base in the world, according to the regional development and reform committee.

 

Xinjiang has developed seven colored cotton strains including brown and green cotton. Researchers with the Xinjiang Genetically Modified Colored Cotton Institute had been working with the hereditary Science Institute of the Chinese Academy of Sciences to produce red, blue and black cotton by transferring an external colored gene into naturally grown white cotton with sophisticated genetic engineering technology.

 

Global colored cotton output reached up to 160,000 tons last year and the sales of cotton yarn rose by over 300 times as compared with 2000.

 

It is estimated that colored cotton output will make up anywhere around 30 percent of world's total cotton in the next three decades.

 

(Xinhua News Agency December 27, 2005)