MILAN – The worst drought in 50 years may have caused less damage than forecast in Brazil’s coffee belt, said yesterday the country’s agriculture minister Neri Geller. In its second estimate for the state food supply agency Conab reduced its forecast for this year’s coffee output to 44.6 million bags, from a previous forecast, issue in January, of 46.5 million to 50.2 million bags.
“I’m not going to give figures, but we expect that the output can be higher than that,” Geller said in an interview in Brasilia. “And growers manage to take good care of the trees because the prices have gone up, so we will have a bumper crop for next year,” he added.
Global coffee trader Mercon Group sees Brazil’s 2014/15 coffee crop at 50.5 million bags, down 4.6 million bags from a previous estimate issue in December. This figures is at the high end of estimates, which have been made since Brazil’s arabica growing region experienced a drought in January and February.
The coffee trader, which has offices in Nicaragua and South Florida, pegs arabica production at 33.45 million bags, down 6.15 million bags from its 2013/14 estimate.
Robusta production is projected at 17.05 million bags, up 1.45 million bags from 2013/14. Mercon estimated that the Minas Gerais region will produce 22.8 million bags, down 16 percent from 2013/14, while Parana will harvest 900,000 bags, down 64 percent from a year ago.
Carryover of coffee as of July 1 will “be sufficient” to offset the drop in arabica production as well as enable Brazil to continue with regular to large volumes of export, says the trader in the report.
“Along the way, we were pleasantly surprised on the general aspect of the trees and how they had recovered compared with the previous trips during the year,” Mercon said in the report with regard to the situation in Sul de Minas, the region that was most seriously affected by the drought.
However, the estimate for the region was cut by 21% to 12.1 million bags. While the sample cherries that were picked there contained beans, they were slightly smaller than usual, the report said. “Every tree had small volumes of dried black cherries to a certain extent, which, when opening, were found that 40-50 percent had aborted as a consequence of the drought,” Mercon stated.
