In cash, the losses compared with last year’s harvest might reach as much as EUR1 billion, according to ZF calculations.
Corn crops will suffer significant losses in the agricultural sector this year, says Nicolae Sitaru, a farmer in Ialomita (south of Romania), who works 2,400 hectares of farming land, 40% of them planted with corn. “It is highly likely that the crop will be 60% of last year’s. The losses will be lower if it rains soon. The problem here was not the drought but the very high temperatures starting April.”
More pessimistic, Mihai Anghel, owner of Cerealcom Dolj, a farming company that works 25,000 hectares of land, says the corn crop is a disaster.
“Corn [crop] is a disaster, a tragedy. It can’t be anything else, since it hasn’t rained for fifty days,” Anghel said without providing any estimates of the impact of the weather on the harvest.
The current situation shows how frail the local agriculture is when faced with weather conditions in the absence of an operational irrigation system. The high temperatures and the drought are thus threatening the corn harvest, which stood at 11.7 million tons last year, that is about EUR2 billion, and covered half of the local grain production in 2011. This year’s harvest might reach 7 million tons.
A lower corn harvest will also make an impact on exports. Sales of corn abroad totaled 2.3 million tons last year, which generated EUR587.7 million revenue and made corn the product with the highest total exported value.
Romanian farmers have planted increasingly larger areas of land with corn over the last two years, tempted by the rising prices. Whereas they planted 2.1 million hectares with corn in 2010, last year they allocated 25% more land for it, i.e. 2.6 million hectares, and this spring planted 2.68 million hectares, according to the data of the Ministry of Agriculture and Rural Development.
The average price per ton of corn stood at EUR181 in Romania early last week.
(English version by Loredana Fratila-Cristescu)