Bulgaria: Barley crop down 27% in 2006

Bulgaria expects to harvest some 465,000 tonnes of barley this year, down by 27% from 2005, while the wheat crop is forecast to fall by some 12% to 3.055 million tonnes, a farm ministry official said June 26.

The projected yield of wheat sowings is around 328 kilogrammes per decare [0.1 hectare] and the expected yield of barley is 259 kilogrammes per decare, the head of the plant growing department at the ministry, Tsviatko Georgiev, told a news conference.

Bulgaria harvested 3.46 million tonnes of wheat and 641,160 tonnes of barley last year.

Georgiev said that in 2006 the country will harvest 9.313 million decares sown under wheat and 1.796 million decares put to barley.

Some 1.1% of wheat sowings and 5.1% of barley sowings had been destroyed due to various reasons, Georgiev added. He did not elaborate.

Bulgaria has so far exported 1.056 million tonnes of wheat from the 2005 crop and exports are expected to reach 1.1 million tonnes for the full marketing year 2005/2006 ending in June 2006, Deputy Agriculture Minister Svetla Bachvarova told the same news conference.

"We traditionally export between 800,000 and 1.1 million tonnes of wheat per year," she told reporters.

Bachvarova declined to comment on the volume of planned wheat exports from the 2006 crop, saying only it would depend on market conditions.