Ukraine's Farm Minister confirmed on Friday his previous sunflower seed crop forecast for 2005 of about three million tonnes, saying predictions of 4.9 million were wrong. "The forecast of 4.9 million tonnes is unrealistic. There are no grounds to expect a yield of about 1.4 tonnes per hectare. It could be as high as about one tonne per hectare," Alexander Baranivsky told Reuters on the sidelines of a World Economic Forum meeting.
"We sowed 3.6 million hectares to sunflower and the average yield could be 0.9 to 1.0 tonne per hectare. The crop will therefore be lower than what forecasters say."
Ukraine's meteorological centre on Thursday forecast a rise in the sunflower seed crop to a record 4.9 million tonnes bunker weight in 2005, 61 percent above last year's 3.05 million.
Tatyana Adamenko, head of the centre's agriculture department, told Reuters the forecast reflected a high sunseed yield combined with an increased area.
Sunseed yielded 0.89 tonne per hectare in 2004. Other analysts said this month Ukraine was likely to harvest 3.6-4.5 million tonnes of sunseed and the sown area could reach four million hectares.
They forecast yields at between 1.03 and 1.23 tonnes per hectare. Agriculture officials have repeatedly said farmers should reduce the area sown to sunseed because the crop exhausts the land too quickly.
They said the area should not exceed two million hectares, and that producers must sharply increase the area sown to rapeseed.
Baranivsky has said Ukraine will boost the rapeseed area to 1.2 million hectares in the next few years from about 230,000 sown to the 2005 crop.
Ukraine harvested 135,000 tonnes of rapeseed in 2004 and could increase the crop to about 200,000 tonnes this year.
But analysts said farms would continue large-scale sunflower sowing because of the crop's high profitability and a possible jump in prices due to a sharp rise in domestic sunseed crushing capacity to at least five million tonnes per season.
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