SA, the continent’s biggest producer of maize, increased its forecast of this year’s record crop after farmers improved their yields.
Growers will probably reap 15.97-million metric tonnes of maize in the 2017 season, Lusani Ndou, a senior statistician at the Pretoria-based crop estimates committee, said on Tuesday.
That is more than double the 7.78-million tonnes produced a year earlier, when the worst drought since records began more than a century ago reduced the harvest to a nine-year low.
The committee increased its estimate by 2.2% from the 15.63-million tonnes it projected in June. The forecast is higher than the 15.8-million tonnes in a Bloomberg survey of analysts and traders last week.
The committee expects a harvest of 9.51-million tonnes of the white variety of maize, used to make a staple food known locally as pap, and 6.46-million tonnes of yellow maize this season.
The forecasts for sunflower seeds, soya beans, groundnuts and sorghum output were left unchanged.
Dry-bean production may be 0.1% higher than previously estimated at 68,525 tonnes.
Farmers will probably plant 498,850ha of wheat in 2017, the committee said.
That would be 1.9% lower than the 508,365ha planted a year earlier, below the estimate in a Bloomberg survey for 502,000ha.
While SA is sub-Saharan Africa’s biggest producer of wheat after Ethiopia, it is still a net importer of the grain, according to US Department of Agriculture figures.
Farmers will probably plant 87,000ha of canola, 28% more than last year, and 98,800ha of malting barley, the committee said.
Bloomberg
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