Vietnam's 2007-08 coffee crop to fall eight percent

Vietnam's next coffee harvest starting this October will produce fewer beans than the previous bumper crop because of dry weather and lower yields, industry experts said on Thursday, with one estimating an 8-percent fall.
The country's October 2007 to September 2008 crop output should ease to 17 million bags from a record 18.5 million bags harvested in the previous season, Jonathan Clark, head of Daemon coffee processing and export firm, told a coffee conference.
"We think that after two good harvests the next crop will be down, but this is still estimate," Clark told Reuters on the sidelines of the two-day international conference in Hanoi.
He said the figure of 18.5 million bags was a conservative estimate by Daemon, a key export firm based in the central highland province of Daklak, Vietnam's largest coffee growing province. A Reuter's poll in January showed Vietnam, the world's second-largest coffee producer after Brazil, turned out 19.4 million bags of the commodity.
One bag contains 60 kg. Clark and Hoang Thanh Time, director of the Agro-Forestry Scientific and Technical Institute, both said that coffee trees often produce lower yields after two bumper crops in a row. "Coffee trees have provided high yields so they will self-adjust naturally," Time said.
Last December, an analyst of UK-based Coffee Network said Vietnam's 2007/2008 output would fall in a recovery from high yields. Doan Tire Nhan, deputy chairman of the Vietnam Coffee and Cocoa Association, said prolonged dryness in the Central Highlands key growing region in recent months would result in a lower output from the next crop. But Item, whose office is based in Buon Ma Thou, the capital city of Daklak, said rains have been falling in the Central Highlands in recent days, helping relieve the coffee crop from the dryness now at the peak of the dry season.
Nhan revised up the last harvest size to 15.5 million bags, from 14.5 million bags estimated in December 2006. Traders say the association, the industry body, often underestimates the country's coffee crop in order to boost prices.
The government on Monday estimated Vietnam's coffee exports in the first half of the current crop year would soar 51 percent on a year to 706,000 tonnes, or 11.77 million bags.