Washington, DC
December 3, 2008
The ICAC Task Force on Commercial
Standardization of Instrument Testing of Cotton (CSITC)
announces the start of the third Round Trials in January of
2009. Participation in a CSITC Round Trial is not limited to
test centers using Uster HVI equipment. CSITC evaluations are
based on test results and are not dependent on the manufacturer,
model or kind of testing instruments used.
The purpose of these trials is to encourage standardization in
cotton instrument testing to promote efficiency in cotton
production and marketing, and to help participating cotton test
centers to ensure that their results be on the same level as
other test centers around the world. Test centers enrolled in
the trials will receive detailed information about their results
to enable them to improve performance. Round trial results for
each test center will not be reported to the public, but overall
results for the round trials as a whole will be published.
The round trials are conducted four times a year. The U.S.
Department of Agriculture will ship a set of cotton samples
before each trial to participating test centers with
instructions to test the cotton six times each day for five days
for length, uniformity index, micronaire, strength, reflectance
and yellowness, for a total of 150 tests, and will collect the
results. These results will be forwarded to the Fiber Institute
of Bremen, Germany, who will analyze them and send evaluations
to individual test centers.
Benefits of Participation
Participants in the CSITC Round Trials will benefit from
detailed feedback that can be utilized to demonstrate
measurement performance to customers and to address measurement
related problems. Results will confirm the participant's ability
to provide reproducible test measurements that are based on the
established international standard. In addition, participation
is a recommended practice for fulfilling quality management
requirements in laboratories. The CSITC Round Trials complement,
but do not replace, the Bremen Cotton Round Trial and the USDA
HVI Checktest.
The round trials are subsidized by the United States Department
of Agriculture, the Fiber Institute of Bremen, Germany, and the
ICAC Secretariat. Support is also received from the Common Fund
for Commodities and the European Commission through the
CFC/ICAC/33 project, but a nominal fee has to be charged to
cover expenses associated with sample distribution.
The International Cotton Advisory
Committee is an association of governments of cotton
producing and consuming countries. The Secretariat of the
Committee publishes information related to world cotton
production, supply, demand and prices, and provides technical
information on cotton production technology. Detailed statistics
are found bimonthly in COTTON: Review of the World Situation,
$185 per year. A monthly outlook is available on the Internet
for $295 per year. Access to the weekly estimates of world
cotton supply and use by the Secretariat is also available on
the Internet for $460 per year. |
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