Serbia’s agriculture output for 2011 is estimated at 6 billion euros ($8 billion), the Serbian Chamber of Commerce said, citing its own sources and the country’s statistics office.
Wheat production rose 27 percent from a year earlier to 2.07 million metric tons due to a higher-than-expected average yield of more than 4.2 tons per hectare (2.5 acres), the Belgrade-based chamber said in a report released today. Corn fell 10 percent to 6.46 million tons, it said.
The value of the country’s top crops, wheat, corn, sugar beet, sunflower and soybeans, fell 19 percent to $2.2 billion because of lower global prices, the chamber said.
The 2012 harvest will probably produce less wheat and more corn than in 2011, as areas sown for wheat will decrease 0.8 percent to 467,712 hectares, the lowest in 60 years, while corn will rise 11 percent to 1.4 million hectares, according to the estimates.
Serbia is also increasing acreage for sugar beet by a quarter to 70,000 hectares, the data showed. Refined sugar was the country’s second-biggest agricultural export last year with almost $160 million of the commodity sold abroad. Corn exports ranked first at $423.8 million.
Source bloomberg
