Coffee production in Colombia, the world’s No. 2 producer of the beans, plunged 33 percent in the first four months of the year, with exports sinking by 21 percent, officials said on Friday.
The National Coffee Growers Federation, or Federacafe, said production in the first four months was 2.88 million 60kg bags, compared with 4.25 million bags in the same period last year.
“The winter, low fertilization and the renovation of coffee plantations had a strong impact on production in the first months of the year,” said Federacafe, which represents the Andean country’s half million coffee growers.
Colombia comes second only to Brazil in coffee production. Much of the country’s northwest is cloaked in the crop.
But the federation stressed the outlook for this year remained encouraging and that despite the first months of the year they would “maintain a production projection of between 10.5 and 11.5 million bags for the year.”
International sales slipped to 3.178 million bags, down 21 percent from the 4.041 million exported from January to April last year.
Total Colombian production last year dipped 9 percent to 11.5 million bags from 12.6 million bags in 2007, but total harvest revenues swelled to a record US$1.953 billion, according to official numbers.
Separately, Ethiopian coffee exports are expected to fall by 30 percent to 40 percent this year and next year, but the country hopes to become the world’s biggest sesame seed exporter this year, the Ethiopian Commodity Exchange (ECX) said on Friday.
Ethiopian officials have blamed bad weather for near total crop failure in some southern growing zones this season, and ECX chief executive Eleni Gabre-Madhin said the global economic slowdown was also hurting overseas sales.
“This year we’re likely to see a 30 to 40 percent shortfall in coffee export earnings relative to last year,” she said in an interview at her office in Addis Ababa.
Coffee accounted for some 60 percent of Ethiopia’s foreign exchange revenue in the 2007 to 2008 season, when it earned more than US$525 million from exports of 170,888 tonnes of mostly high quality arabica beans.
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