China's COFCO has temporarily suspended operations at its Timbues grains plant in Argentina after 12 employees tested positive for COVID-19, a company spokesman told Reuters on Tuesday.
The outage at the plant started on Monday and was expected to last about one week, said Allan Virtanen, global communications director at COFCO International. The plant employees 350 workers and has an annual grains and oilseeds processing capacity of 6.5 million tonnes, he added.
The plant's first COVID-19 case was confirmed on Saturday.
"We tested 24 people who had been in contact with the initial person, and 11 of those tested positive," Virtanen said.
(Reporting by Hugh Bronstein; Editing by Adam Jourdan)
