Asian coffee markets were tepid as weak London prices discouraged Vietnamese farmers from offloading stocks, while Indonesian traders waited for a mini-harvest to gather pace, traders said on Thursday. Farmers in Daklak, Vietnam's main coffee-growing province, quoted beans at 36,500 dong-37,000 dong ($1.60-$1.63) per kg, compared with 37,000 dong-37,600 dong a week earlier, in line with a fall in London prices.
The ICE May futures contract fell to as low as $1,742 a tonne on Wednesday, its lowest in a month. Vietnamese traders quoted the 5 percent black and broken grade 2 robusta at a discount of $70-$100 per tonne to the ICE May futures contract, tightening slightly from a $50-$100 discount a week earlier.
Traders said farmers have been discouraged by low prices in the international market, especially after a big sale before Tet, Vietnam's Lunar New Year celebration and biggest holiday, which lasted from February 14-20 this year. In January-February, coffee exports from Vietnam, the world's second biggest producer of the commodity, rose an estimated 17.6 percent from a year ago to 336,000 tonnes, government data showed. In Indonesia, beans exports from the province of Lampung plunged 72 percent in February from a year earlier to 4,042.1 tonnes, marking the sixth straight month of decline in exports from the country's largest coffee producing region.
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