South Africa, the continent’s biggest producer of corn, boosted its final estimate for this year’s record crop as the pace of deliveries continues to point to a bumper harvest.
Growers will probably reap 16.74 million metric tons of corn in the 2016-17 season, Lusani Ndou, a senior statistician at the Pretoria-based Crop Estimates Committee, said by phone on Thursday. That’s more than double the 7.78 million tons produced a year earlier, when the worst drought since records began more than a century ago reduced the harvest to a nine-year low.