PARIS, Feb 4 (Reuters) – Sugar and ethanoal group Tereos said on Friday that yields for its 2021/22 French sugar beet crop were slightly below its five-year average but still well above those in the previous year’s disease-hit harvest.
Tereos’ yield was estimated at 84 tonnes per hectare at 16 degrees of sugar, leading to production of 16.5 million tonnes of sugar beets, it said in a statement.
The yield was also slightly below a 2021/22 national average of 85.7 tonnes per hectare, as estimated by the French farm ministry in December.
Cooperative-owned Tereos said its growers had replanted about 8% of its crop area following frost damage in April and that 10% of the replanted area was then hit by virus yellows disease.
The disease, spread by insects, had caused more widespread damage in 2020, leading the government to relax a ban on insecticides known as neonicotinoids.
Tereos, the world’s second-largest sugar producer by volume, said sugar content in its 2021/22 beet crop was well below the average of the past five years.
(Reporting by Gus Trompiz and Sybille de La Hamaide, Editing by Louise Heavens)
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