20100906
reuters

CAPE TOWN (Reuters) - South Africa will continue talks with China on Tuesday to attract new investment into agro-processing plants and find a market for the country's surplus maize, the agriculture minister said on Monday.

South Africa, the continent's largest producers of maize, produced a surplus of about 4 million tonnes for the 2009/10 season, but with limited markets and poor prices has struggled to sell the surplus internationally.

"We've had our first round of negotiations with the minister of agriculture as well as the minister of imports in China," Tina Joemat-Pettersson, Minister of Agriculture, Forestry and Fisheries told reporters ahead of her departure to China.

"Although China does not import maize as a necessity, they import value-added products which would be cattle-feed and poultry-feed, so the discussions we are having would be to use some of the maize for value-addition, which would then mean that we set up systems for agro-processing for the surplus maize that we do have," she said.