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-be...
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