May 1, 2012

Spain's Agriculture Ministry said on Monday (Apr 30) that the country's corn plantings have dropped by 15.3% this spring from a year ago due to lack of irrigation reserves in one key region after a long drought.

In preliminary estimates using data culled by the end of March, the ministry said plantings fell to 313,200 hectares from 369,600 in 2011.

Most of the predicted drop was in the northern Aragon region where reservoir levels have fallen sharply and left farmers short of irrigation water essential for growing corn in Spain's harsh climate.

The ministry also forecast that a drought which lasted until the end of March would cut the forthcoming harvest of winter-planted grains - mainly wheat and barley - by some 30%, compared to a drop of 25% in its previous monthly crop progress report.

Farmers and agronomists say that plentiful rain which has fallen since late March will do much to alleviate crop damage in the northern half of the country, which produces most of Spain's wheat and barley, but may have come too late for parched southern regions.

The most pronounced drop predicted by the ministry was in durum wheat, which is mainly grown in southerly Andalucia and is the only cereal in which Spain ever has an exportable surplus.

Spain needs to import at least 10 million tonnes of grain a year, making it a major client for exporters from Argentina to Kazakhstan. Predicting Spain's winter grain harvest is subject to a wide margin of error, because in recent years it has varied anywhere between 9-20 million tonnes.

Spain's wheat harvest usually begins in May in the south, and field work spreads gradually northwards to reach the northerly Castilla-Leon grainbelt by late June.