Guatemala's high-quality coffee crop is safe from a spate of landslides caused by heavy rains this weekend that killed dozens of people, the national coffee organisation Anacafe said on Monday.
At least 44 people were killed after mountainsides collapsed and rivers burst their banks on Saturday and Sunday, but most of the damage was in the western part of the country away from coffee fields, Anacafe head Ricardo Villanueva told Reuters.
"There is no damage so far," Villanueva said in an interview. But September and October are usually the wettest months in Central America's No 1 coffee producer so growers will be wary until the rainy season ends.
"I can't be calm until the end of October," he said. This weekend's rains caused serious damages to roads and bridges, but most of the infrastructure problems should be repaired by the time coffee harvesting begins in earnest in the last few months of the year.
Most of the country's coffee from the current season has already been exported, and Villanueva said there has been no interruptions to ports from the storms. Guatemala, like other producers in the region, is expecting a larger coffee crop this year of between 3.6 million and 3.76 million 60-kg bags, a rise from the 3.375 million bags of output in 2009/10, Villanueva told Reuters in an interview.
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