TUNIS: France expects its soft wheat exports to Tunisia to stand at 400,000 tonnes in 2012, a senior official at the French grain exports body told Reuters on Tuesday, unchanged from forecasts for this year.
"We will export 400,000 tonnes of soft wheat to Tunisia in 2012," Yann Lebeau, Maghreb and African region manager at France Exports Cereales, said on the sidelines of a grain seminar in Tunis.
Lebeau previously said he expected the grain exports body to export the same volume in 2011 to the North African country.
French customs data showed France exported 370,000 tonnes of soft wheat to Tunisia in the 2010/2011 season, a 172 percent rise from the previous campaign.
Tunisia's agriculture ministry predicted the domestic grain output for this year will more than double from the 1.1 million tonnes it harvested in 2010.
Lebeau said he expected Morocco, another big North African buyer of French grain, to import 700,000 tonnes of soft wheat from France in 2012.
That was lower than an estimate by France Export Cereales chairman, Jean-Pierre Langlois-Berthelot, who last month put the figure at 1.2 million tonnes.
Lebeau also told Reuters that Algeria, France's top client in the Maghreb region, would buy between 3.5 million and 4 million tonnes of soft wheat from France in 2012.
The forecast was slightly down from the previous year when French soft wheat sales to Algeria reached 4.2 million tonnes.
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