Cocoa arrivals at Ivory Coast's ports in the week of June 23-29 slipped to 18,828 tonnes from 21,112 tonnes in the previous week, exporters said on Friday, but they reported better quality beans from the waning mid-crop.
Accumulated port arrivals in the world's top grower for the 2007/08 season up to June 29 reached 1,240,926 tonnes, up from 1,138,227 tonnes in the same period a year ago, according to data from exporters obtained by Reuters. Shippers said they expected last week's arrivals level, which compared with 9,031 tonnes received at the ports of Abidjan and San Pedro in the same week of the 2006/2007 season, to decrease further as the current mid-crop petered out.
But they said the quality of beans being offered from the bush had improved, thanks to favourable rains. "The quality's been getting better for some time now. We're getting less wet and humid beans and they're also getting a bit bigger due to the rains ... so overall, things are advancing, even if it's a bit slow," said the sales director of one Abidjan-based European export company.
"We hope this (improvement in quality) is going to continue up until the next main crop (to start in October)," the director of another exporting company said. Ivory Coast's Coffee and Cocoa Bourse (BCC) said on Friday it was keeping its nonbinding indicative farm-gate price for cocoa at 500 CFA francs ($1.20) per kg for the July to September period, unchanged from the previous April-June period.
"The minimum price for the July, August and September period is not changing and stays at 500 CFA, the same as we announced in April," the newly-appointed president of the BCC management board, Edoukou Kouadio Angoua, said. The guideline price for the July-September period in 2007 was 400 CFA francs a kilo.
Angoua, who was appointed recently after his predecessor and some 20 other senior Ivorian cocoa sector figures were arrested on fraud and embezzlement charges, said however he hoped the BCC could establish a better price for growers in the coming season.
"We didn't change the price because we wanted to remain prudent even though the market is rising strongly at the moment," he said. "But we're going to do everything we can to offer our friends the producers from the next season onwards a price that's closer to the one in the market," Angoua added.
In London, benchmark September cocoa futures were down 21 pounds to 1,638 pounds a tonne in moderate volume, as profit-taking weighed on soft commodities with operators taking advantage of the US Independence Day holiday on Friday. ICE September cocoa futures tumbled on Thursday to close down $112, or 3.5 percent, at $3,136 a tonne.
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