Coffee output in Espirito Santo, Brazil’s top-producing state for Robusta, could drop 30 per cent from a year earlier to 9 million bags as dry weather cuts yields, according to Cooabriel, the variety’s top growing cooperative.
“Plants and cherries have not developed as they would under normal conditions,” Edimilson Calegari, the co-op’s general manager, said in a telephone interview from Sao Gabriel da Palha, Brazil. Robusta makes up 80 per cent of coffee output in the state, he said. The government in January estimated the area’s Robusta crop would fall as much as 10 per cent this year.
Eastern and northern Espirito Santo got as little as 40 millimetres (1.6 inches) of rain since 1 January, or 25 per cent of normal, according to MDA Weather Services. While Robusta is typically more resistant to drought and disease, “the extreme dryness will hurt even the hardiest of plants,” Donald Keeney, a meteorologist with MDA, said in a telephone interview Tuesday from Gaithersburg, Maryland. Below-average precipitation is forecast from 14 February through the middle of next week, he said.
Adding to farmers’ woes is an outbreak of an insect called cochonilha that eats the plant’s sap, causing coffee cherries to wither, Calegari said.
The smaller crop comes as demand climbs for the beans, widely used to make instant drinks, and amid falling output in Vietnam, the world’s top supplier. Brazil’s shipments of Robusta more than doubled in 2014 to the most since 2002, industry data show.
A Robusta price index in Brazil rose Wednesday to 304.24 reais ($106.06) per bag (60 kilograms), up 5.3 per cent this month and the highest since records started in 2001, Cepea, a University of Sao Paulo research unit, said in an e-mailed report.
Bloomberg News, edited by ESM
