China has emerged as a huge force in the world cotton and textile trade, especially after harsh weather savaged its crop and forced it to turn to imports to feed its booming textile and apparel mills.
At the same time, a dispute erupted between the United States, the world's top trading power, and China, the fifth largest trading country, over the strong pace of Chinese textile exports to American shores.
Washington slapped import quotas on Chinese-made bras, bathrobes and knit clothes on November 18.
The Chinese denounced the move, and cancelled a cotton buying trip to the States, but the furor appears to have died down.
"There will be some discussion about the trade situation," Mark Lange, president of the US industry group National Cotton Council (NCC), told Reuters in an interview at the start of the Beltwide Cotton Conference.
Carl Anderson, a respected economist with Texas A&M University, said in a separate interview the US cotton trade will be looking closely at "China and its role in the world market."
Another trade issue to be featured in the conference will be the newly forged Central America Free Trade Agreement (CAFTA), a deal already denounced by the American Textile Manufacturers Institute (ATMI) as a "job destroying agreement."
The industry group said in a statement, "This administration demonstrated that it was more interested in getting an agreement, any agreement, rather than saving US manufacturing jobs."
There is also a complaint filed by Brazil against US cotton subsidies, and Lange said the American cotton industry would want to get a sense of "where things stand" on the free trade agreements being negotiated by Washington.
Analysts said most of the attention on China will focus on how much more cotton it will buy in the 2003/04 marketing year (August/July).
Mike Stevens, an analyst for Swiss Financial Services in Mandeville, Louisiana, said in an interview the trade will be closely watching the views on China of William Dunavant Jr., the chief executive of leading merchant Dunavant Enterprises, which has an office in China and does some business there.
"The focus will be on the demand side," Stevens stressed.
Figures compiled by the US Department of Agriculture show that total Chinese cotton purchases as of the last weekly export sales report stood at 3.263 million running bales (RBs, 500-lbs each), almost five times more than the 675,700 RBs at this time last year.
As late as October, estimates of Chinese cotton imports in 2003/04 were ranging from 3 million to 4 million 480-lb bales.
USDA now forecasts Chinese cotton imports in 2003/04 at 7.0 million bales.
Some analysts feel the figure could jump to as high as 8 million to 10 million bales.
USDA, in its last monthly supply/demand report, pegged Chinese cotton output at 22 million bales while forecasting consumption at 30.2 million bales. Earlier, China's cotton crop had been forecast at 27 million bales.
"The Chinese element and the World Trade Organisation will really be discussed," said Sharon Johnson, cotton expert at Frank Schneider and Co Inc in Atlanta.
Anderson said the difficulty in gauging patterns of Chinese production and consumption in the months and years ahead has the potential of "upsetting the whole world-wide system of demand."
He added, "We really have a market that is uncertain and erratic."
Lange said other topics seen capturing interest in the conference would be fibber quality and methods to further raise production on American farms. "I believe there are still quality concerns," he said.
Johnson said that with cotton surging to its highest price since late 1995, there will also be some discussion of "planting potential in the US and overseas for this coming spring."