RABAT, March 7 (Reuters) – Morocco will at best produce 4 million tonnes of cereals this year, or less than half last year’s harvest, the head of a state-run agricultural research institute said on Wednesday.
“This year will be very difficult for farming in Morocco …It is the worst year as far as rainfalls are concerned since 2007,” Mohamed Badraoui, head of the National Institute for Agricultural Research, told Reuters.
“Last year we produced 8.4 million tonnes of cereals. We don’t think that the harvest will exceed 4 million tonnes this year,” he said.
Badraoui could not give a breakdown for the cereals harvest forecast.
Last year’s harvest included 4.17 million tonnes of soft wheat, 1.85 million tonnes of durum wheat and 2.34 million tonnes of barley.
Morocco’s cereals harvest in 2007 stood at 2 million tonnes, which covered about a quarter of the North African country’s domestic needs.
(Reporting by Souhail Karam; editing by Jason Neely)
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