Russia cuts sugar beet harvest 8% to 40 mln tonnes by Nov 13 - sugar producers union
MOSCOW. Nov 16 (Interfax) - Russia had harvested 40 million tonnes of sugar beets by November 13, or 8% less than it had gathered by the same time last year, the Union of Russian Sugar Producers reported.
This crop had been gathered from 93% of the harvest area by November 13. Yield averaged at 384 centners per hectare, which is 2% lower than it was last year.
Over half of the sugar beet harvest - 21.8 million tonnes - was concentrated in the Central Federal District. In the south, 8.4 million tonnes of the crop were gathered, 7.2 million tonnes were harvested in the Volga area, 2.1 million tonnes in the North Caucasus and 500,000 tonnes in Siberia.
At the moment, 74 sugar factories are processing sugar beets. Several enterprises in the Krasnoyarsk territory and the Chechnya sugar factory have already finished their work.
According to the union's forecasts, beet sugar production this year, "given current figures for sugar beet quality and its processing, as well as the weather forecast for the end of the year, will total 4.7-5 million tonnes, compared to the record 5.1 million tonnes in 2011."
