Economics
South Africa Plants Smallest Corn Area Since Worst Drought
- Sunflower area is smallest in nine years, committee says
- Groundnut coverage is least on record at 19,200 hectares
Photographer: Daniel Acker/Bloomberg
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South African corn farmers, who historically produce the continent’s biggest harvest, have probably planted the smallest area with the grain since the worst drought on record three years ago.
Producers have covered 2.27 million hectares of ground with corn this season, 2.1 percent less than in 2018, Lusani Ndou, a senior statistician at the Pretoria-based Crop Estimates Committee, said by phone Tuesday. That compares with 1.97 million hectares forecast in a Bloomberg survey and would be the least since the 2015-16 season. Then, the crop was ravaged by a lack of rainfall that was the worst since records started in 1904.