Romania, among top producing EU countries with a corn harvest of 11 million tonnes

The European Union is in the final stages of gathering a larger-than-expected corn harvest, with good weather helping crop development in most top producing countries. Romania is among these top producing countries and will harvest 10.8 million tonnes, up from 10.6 million tonnes last year.
“The harvest will mean a good market supply of maize for animal feed, ethanol and food maize,” said Claus Keller of German commodity analysts FO Licht, quoted by producer.com. “It will also reduce the EU’s import requirement for maize in the next year.”? The EU is likely to gather a bumper harvest of almost 74 million tonnes of grain corn this year, up from 64.5 million tonnes last year, Keller estimated. This was up from forecasts of 70.4 million tonnes in September. “This is one of the best EU harvests of all time following favourable weather in the summer,” Keller said. In the region, Hungary will harvest a bumper 8.9 million tonnes, up from 6.6 million tonnes, and Italy 8.1 million tonnes, up from 7.6 million. The larger EU crop could be bad news for corn exporters to Europe, including Ukraine, he said.
“This is one of the best EU harvests of all time following favourable weather in the summer,” Keller said. The harvest is in full swing in France, the EU’s largest corn producer, and results have reinforced expectations of a record crop. Germany’s crop is expected to jump to 5.3 million tonnes from 4.4 million tonnes, FO Licht estimated.? However, in Poland, the crop is likely to fall to 3.7 million tonnes from 3.8 million tonnes last year, said Wojtek Sabaranski of Sparks Polska.
According to Minister of Agriculture and Rural Development data, Romania ranks first in EU in terms of area cultivated with maize, 2.5 million hectares, but very low yield per hectare makes the country being behind many countries with a much smaller cultivated area.