At least part of the gap may be explained by farmers feeding maize to their cows and chickens and by the recent appearance of giant plastic storage bags on farms.
But neither accounts fully for the roughly 2.4 million "missing tonnes." There are strong market suspicions that the official forecast, which would be a bumper crop and the best in over two decades, is accurate and that farmers are hoarding maize in-house in a bid to drive prices up.
Many farmers, who have obvious market incentives for saying so, maintain that the official forecast is too high. It is possible that the crop committee's forecast is spot on but there is still less than 12.18 million tonnes available for the market.
"Because of the low price we reckon a lot of farmers have fed maize to their livestock and poultry," Rodney Dredge, the chairman of the Crop Estimates Committee, told Reuters.
That is how yellow maize often ends up but white maize can also be used for this purpose. A recent drop in the yellow maize price when the cost of its white counterpart was marching higher was attributed by traders to an abundance of animal feed in the market a scenario, which points to farmers feeding excess grain to livestock.