SA, Africa’s biggest maize producer, boosted its final estimate for 2017’s record crop, as the pace of deliveries continued to point to a bumper harvest. Growers will probably reap 16.74-million tonnes of maize in the 2016-17 season, Lusani Ndou, a senior statistician at the Crop Estimates Committee, said on Thursday. That’s 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 bumper crop has helped support the economy, which emerged from a recession in the second quarter. The agriculture sector surged an annualised 34% in the second quarter from the previous three months, while slowing food price growth has helped limit inflation in 2017 The committee raised its maize-crop estimate by 2% from the 16.41-million tonnes it projected in August. The harvest is split between white and yellow maize. Bloomberg
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