About 6% of Russia's total harvested farmland has been damaged during a recent heat wave and losses are "going through the roof" in some regions, the country's deputy agriculture minister said Friday.

"Today we have all together 4.4 million hectares or about 6% of the total area sown that have suffered from this abnormal phenomenon," Igor Manylov said at a meeting with Prime Minister Dmitry Medvedev, Interfax reported.

The Southern, Volga, Siberian and Ural regions had suffered the worst damage.

"The data on the loss to the harvest is going through the roof compared to the average," Mr. Manylov said.

The comment came shortly after Russia's national weather center, Rosgidromet, lowered its forecast for this year's grain harvest to 77 million-80 million metric tons from an earlier estimate of 83 million-86 million tons, due to drought.

Newspaper Web site: http://www.interfax.ru

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(END) Dow Jones Newswires

July 27, 2012 07:06 ET (11:06 GMT)