S Africa raises forecast for record corn harvest

Johannesburg

SOUTH Africa, the continent's biggest producer of corn, increased its forecast of this year's record crop after farmers improved their yields.

Growers will probably reap 15.97 million tonnes of corn in the 2017 season, Lusani Ndou, a senior statistician at the Pretoria-based Crop Estimates Committee, said on Tuesday. 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.