The Ministry of Agriculture forecasts $3.2 million worth of losses, mainly in crops of white corn.
The heavy rains that have been falling since 28 August have flattened 4,852 hectares of corn, which represents a loss of $2.6 million.
The Minister for Agriculture, Juan Alfonso De León, explained that while around 300,000 hundred weight of grain will no longer enter the market due to the rain, production is still expected to exceed 29 million sacks in the current harvest, according to Prensalibre.com. "We do not expect to have to resort to an import contingency plan," he said.
Despite the announcement from the Government that they would open the quotas to the cooperatives, one of them got only 1.98% of the 120,500 metric tons of food.
Last May, the Government of Alvaro Colom announced with great fanfare that it would free up the food import quotas, and that these would be administered by the cooperatives in order to promote competition and to provide consumers with the benefits of duty-exempted products.