(MENAFN) Saudi Arabia's wheat production is expected to drop 30 percent to 700,000 metric tons in the 12 months ending June 2011, from one million tons in the previous period, Reuters reported
According to the US Department of Agriculture's Foreign Agricultural Service, Saudi Arabia produced 1.72 million tons of wheat in the 12 months ending June 2009.
The kingdom decided in January 2008 to reduce wheat production by 12.5 percent a year, abandoning a 30-year-old program to grow its own, having achieved self-sufficiency but at the high cost of depleting the desert kingdom's scarce water supplies.
The Arab world's largest economy which imports the bulk of its food needs, is expected to import two million tons of wheat in 2010-11, compared with 1.64 million tons a year earlier, it said.
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