Algeria will produce a lower than expected cereals harvest of four million tonnes in 2004 due to recent bad weather, the Agriculture Ministry said on Sunday.
Algeria, one of the world's largest grain importers, had earlier this month forecast a harvest exceeding 4.3 million tonnes it obtained last year.
"We were expecting more but we got some problems of humidity a few weeks ago. But I can tell you that we are happy with this harvest," Amar Assabah, the agriculture ministry's director of production, told Reuters.
Late rains and humidity - creating diseases - hurt the quality of the harvest in the east of the country, particularly around the city of Constantine.
Of the 2004 harvest, which ends on August 15, three million tonnes were wheat and one million barley.
"We will have something like 1.8 million tonnes of durum wheat, 1.2 million tonnes of soft wheat and one million tonnes of barley," Assabah said.
"We are also expecting the per yield to be more or less 1.5 tonnes per hectare. It is an excellent average," he said.
The north African country uses three million hectares of wheat fields of its overall land surface, and its needs are estimated at above six million tonnes per year.
On average it imports some 2.4 million tonnes of grain per year.
The Agriculture Ministry did not expect this year or next year's harvests to considerably cut the import bill, which the government has hoped to reduce.