More Of The Last Thing Spain Needs - Cloudless Skies, Warm Weather

In February the seed sellers will have an idea of demand for maize seed, but they sometimes give buyers the option of returning what they do not use. The 2005 maize harvest is estimated to have dropped 17 percent to just under 4 million tonnes, with bigger falls in key growing areas like the Ebro river valley, Catalonia and Aragon.

This year, there is likely to be a further fall, traders say, because farmers will not plant if they are in doubt about water supplies. Urban water takes priority over farm irrigation, which is likely to be tightly restricted this year. Grain prices have come down in recent weeks because of the pressure on intermediaries to shift goods from port stores, which are chock-full with imported grain.

"Now they have steadied and should stay where they are until March or April when people start to get nervous about the outlook for this year's harvest," a trader in Seville said. Reservoirs are 47 percent full on average after the recent rains, the Environment Ministry said earlier this week.

But that figure hides wide disparities between lakes in the wet north, which are up to 95 percent full, and those in the Segura basin in the southeast, which are almost 90 percent empty. There are few connections between the different hydrological basins. The Tagus basin can supply the Segura, but the Tagus reservoirs are only 42 percent full and have to provide for the Madrid region's 6 million inhabitants.


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http://www.planetark.org/dailynewsstory.cfm/newsid/34615/story.htm