Cotton Price Today - View Live Price South Africa ☑️ (2025)

Cotton is an agricultural commodity, a group of commodities that is classified into six categories. Cotton is grouped together with soybeans, palm oil, and canola, in the category called oilseeds.

Quick Overview of Cotton

✔️An overview of cotton and its history
✔️The production of cotton
✔️Trading cotton as an agricultural commodity
What are the drivers of the cotton price?
The uses of cotton
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An overview of cotton and its history

As a commodity

Agricultural commodities are commodities that are obtained from the growing and harvesting of crops or the raising of livestock.

The other five categories of agricultural commodities are:

Dairy products like cheddar cheese, class III milk (cheese milk), and class IV milk.
Cereal grains such as corn, barley, oat, rough rice, and wheat.
Meat includes livestock like lean hogs and cattle from which bones, hooves, hides, meat, and organs are taken.
Soft commodities comprise cocoa, coffee, tea (black and green), and frozen concentrated orange juice (FCOJ).
Miscellaneous agricultural commodities refer to commodities that do not fit into one of the other five categories of agricultural commodities. This category includes wool (fine and greasy sheep wool), rubber (natural and synthetic), and lumber, also called timber.

Cotton is considered one of the top agricultural commodities in terms of annual consumption.

Features of Cotton

Cotton is a fluffy and soft fibre that is cultivated in tropical and subtropical regions worldwide. The softness of cotton makes for a fabric that often keeps that soft feel.
Cotton fabric is considerably absorbent because there is a considerable amount of space between the cotton fibres.
It is able to keep dye well because of its absorbent nature, allowing it to be made into a wide range of colours.
It has natural breathability, keeping one cool in summer and comfortable and warm in winter.
The ample space between the cotton fibres makes cotton an extremely absorbent fabric, able to absorb three times its own weight in water.
Cotton becomes stronger when it is wet.
It is durable due to the strong cellular structure of the cotton plant.
Cotton is anti-static, meaning it does not conduct electricity.

Types of the cotton plant

There are about 45 types of cotton species, but only the following four are commercially grown globally.

Extra-long staple cotton, also known as Pima cotton, is from the species Gossypium barbadense. It is considered the world’s finest type of cotton. It has extra soft and extra long fibres. Pima cotton is also resistant to wrinkling, fading, and tearing. It is cultivated in South America, in the southwestern region of the USA, and in the Nile River Valley in Egypt where it is referred to as Egyptian cotton. The global output of this type of cotton is about 8 percent.
Tree cotton – from the species Gossypium arboreum – is grown in India and Pakistan. It contributes less than 2 percent of the world’s cotton production.
Levant cotton (from the species Gossypium herbaceum) is cultivated in Southern Africa and the Arabian Peninsula. These regions produce less than 2% of the global cotton production.
Upland cotton (Gossypium hirsutum) provides about 90 percent of global cotton production. It is of short and medium staple length and is grown in Central America, the Caribbean, Mexico, and the southern region of the state of Florida in the USA. Upland cotton originally referred to cotton cultivated on raised lands not exposed to flooding.

Some terms used in the cotton industry

Organic cotton refers to any type of cotton that is cultivated without the application of chemicals or cotton that is not obtained from cotton plants that are genetically modified.
Cotton Gin refers to the ‘Cotton Engine,’ a machine that is able to separate the cotton fibres and the seeds quite quickly.
Boll is the fruit of a cotton plant in which cotton is formed. Put differently, a boll is the encasing for the fluffy cotton fibres. Bolls mature after a period of 55 to 80 days.
Cotton refers to the part of the cotton plant that grows in the boll.
Ginning is the process of separating the cotton fibres from the seeds.
A bale is a bundle of raw cotton. Bale weight differs in different countries. In the USA, a bale measures approximately 0.48 cubic metres (17 cubic feet) while it weighs about 226.8 kg. (500 pounds).
Lint is raw ginned cotton, ready for baling.
Linters refer to the short fibres which stay on the cotton seed after the ginning process.
Micronaire is the size of an individual cotton fibre measured in cross-section.
A picker is a machine that separates and cleans the fibres of cotton.
Seed cotton is a description of unginned picked cotton.
Sliver indicates a loose rope of cotton fibres. A card sliver is thicker than a drawn sliver and has more tangled fibres.
A yarn is a long continuous length of interlocked cotton fibres, derived from spinning and suitable to make clothes and to produce textiles. Yarns are classified by number. The higher the yarn number, the finer (thinner and softer) the yarn. For instance, a #16 yarn is twice the weight of a #32 yarn.
Staple is an indication of the average length of cotton fibres. The different staples are:
Short staple: less than 25mm
Medium Staple: 25 to 30mm
Long Staple: 30 to 37mm
Extra Long Staple: 37mm and above

Notes about the history of cotton

Historians are not exactly certain where and when the cultivation and use of cotton started. Opinions offered are, amongst others:

Cotton was used for making cloths in 5000 BCE in the ‘Indus Valley Civilisation’ (nowadays Pakistan). Another opinion is that cotton has been used in the Indus Valley since 3000 BCE.
Traces of cotton were found in Peru that date back to 6000 BCE.
The earliest production of cotton occurred in India, as far back as the fifth millennium BCE.
During 800 AD, cotton arrived in Europe because of the Arab merchants. The English word ‘cotton’ derives from the Arabic word ’quton’ (also spelled ‘qutun’ or ‘qutn’).
By 1500 AD, cotton has been cultivated all over the world.

The Industrial Revolution of the 1800s, one of the most significant events in world history that started in England, had a profound impact on the cotton industry. For example, James Hargreaves (1720 – 1778), an English weaver and inventor, invented the Spinning Jenny in the second part of the eighteenth century.

The Spinning Jenny was one of the major developments in the industrialisation of textile manufacturing, speeding up production. For instance, with the Spinning Jenny, eight threads could be spun at a time, instead of a single thread using a spinning wheel.

In 1794, the American Eli Whitney (1765 – 1825), patented his invention, the mechanical cotton gin, which is the machine that efficiently and quickly separates cotton fibres from their seeds. The cotton gin enabled much more productivity than manual labour, reducing the hours of manual labour needed to produce a bale of cotton from 600 hours to only 12.

The word ‘gin’ in ‘cotton gin’ derives from ‘engine.’

It is important to mention that the first cotton gin was invented in India in the thirteenth century. However, Whitney’s invention was the first modern mechanical version.

The production of cotton

Major cotton producers globally

Figures obtained from Statista indicate that the following countries were the top 10 cotton producers in the world in the 2025/2022 season.

China: 5 879 000 metric tonnes (MT)
India: 5 334 000 000 MT
USA: 3 815 000 MT
Brazil: 2 678 000 MT
Pakistan: 1 306 000 MT
Australia: 1 197 000 MT
Türkiye (formerly known as Turkey): 827 000 MT
Uzbekistan: 577 000 MT
Argentina: 327 000 MT
Mali: 311 000 MT

The top 3 global producers (China, India, and the USA) of cotton contributed almost 68 percent of the world’s cotton production.

Four countries – China, India, Pakistan, and Uzbekistan – are located in Asia, while Brazil and Argentina are situated in South America. The USA is part of the North American continent, while Türkiye is a transcontinental country, located in both Asia (97 percent) and Europe (3 percent).

Australia is the smallest continent in the world. However, some geographers consider it as a part of a continent referred to as Oceania, including Australia, New Zealand, and thousands of islands throughout the Central and South Pacific Ocean.

Mali is the largest cotton producer in Africa, followed by Benin, Côte d’Ivoire, and Burkina Faso, all of them located in western Africa. Mali planted 795 000 hectares (ha) of cotton in the 2025/2022 season, up an incredible 630 000 hectares from the previous year’s crop.

Producing cotton

The cotton plant belongs to the genus Gossypium of the family Malvacea (mallow family).

Cotton is produced from the natural fibres, which are of different varying lengths, of cotton plants.

Cotton plants need plenty of sunshine, a long period without frost, and enough rain.

Typically, the seeds are planted in the spring and the cotton is harvested in autumn. It takes approximately five to six months for the cotton plant to mature and for the bolls to open before the cotton can be harvested.

Nowadays, one of two harvesting machines is used to harvest cotton, namely:

A cotton picker which removes the cotton from the boll without damaging the cotton plant.
A cotton stripper which plucks off the entire boll with the cotton from the plant.

However, some developing countries around the world still use labourers to pick cotton manually.

After the harvesting of the cotton, it is baled and stored at the cotton fields before it is sent to the cotton gins.

Next, the cotton bales are cleaned and fluffed at the cotton gins to remove dirt, seeds, and lint.

After the cotton has moved through the gins where the fibres are completely separated from the seeds, the raw cotton is compressed and stored, ready to be sent to textile mills for further production.

The cleaned and fluffed cotton is put through a carding machine to further clean the material and to convert the short fibres into long-untwisted ropes, ready for spinning and weaving.

Finally, the cotton is spun into yarns which are then woven to manufacture soft and durable fabric.

Trading cotton as an agricultural commodity

Trading instruments, also referred to as financial instruments, offered by commodity brokers are, amongst others:

Cotton options on futures which are available on the Intercontinental Exchange (ICE).

Cotton exchange-traded funds (ETFs)

ETFs trade as shares on stock exchanges similar to ordinary shares. The following two ETFs trade in cotton via futures markets:

iPath Bloomberg Cotton Subindex Total Return ETN
iPath Pure Beta Cotton ETN

Contracts for difference (CFDs) allow traders to speculate on the price of cotton.

Cotton futures contracts

The contracts are available on the New York Mercantile Exchange (NYMEX) and Chicago Mercantile Exchange (CME).

The size of each contract is 50 000 pounds, and the price is quoted in US dollars and cents. The expiry dates of the contracts are March, May, July, October, and December.

As of September 8, 2025, ‘cotton futures were trading around 106USd/Lbs, the lowest in over four weeks, as traders weighed prospects of lower demand and reduced supplies,’ according to Trading Economics.

The broker will also explain the pros, cons, and risks involved when trading with these financial instruments.

In addition to trading instruments, a regulated and trusted commodity broker will also provide the necessary services, guidance, and trading platform and will help you to determine your risk appetite.

There are no publicly traded companies that are directly involved in the cotton industry. However, a trader/investor can get indirect exposure to cotton prices by buying shares of companies that provide products and seeds to farmers. Examples of such companies are:

Monsanto, a global agricultural company listed on the New York Stock Exchange (NYSE), provides seeds and other products to farmers.
The Mosaic Company, is also a global agricultural company listed on the NYSE, which provides seeds and concentrated phosphate crop nutrients.

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