Colombia expects to have the majority of coffee crops renovated with disease-resistant varieties by 2016, which would allow the country to gradually boost output, the head of the growers federation told Reuters on Monday. The Andean country, the world's top producer of high-quality Arabica beans, has suffered over the last few years from poor weather and diseases that hit coffee output while an ongoing tree renovation program took some plants out of production.
Last year, Colombian coffee output hit a three-decade low of 7.73 million 60-kg bags compared with historic averages of around 11 million sacks, pushing up global prices. Luis Genaro Munoz, head of the National Federation of Colombian Coffee Growers, said in an interview that the group aimed to have a Colombian coffee crop that was "technified, young and resistant to climate change" in 2016.
"Thereafter we'll grow in productivity and production ... and if the market allows for it, why not expand crop areas to over a million hectares to reach 18 million bags?" he said. Colombia currently has 930,000 hectares planted with coffee trees of which around 45 percent have been renovated with fungus-resistant varieties.
Munoz said that by 2016 the tree renovation program should be around 90 percent complete. One of the world's top exporters of coffee, the country has seen output fall in recent years because torrential rains prevented flowering and sparked an increase in coffee tree diseases. Farmers have also been hit by lower bean prices and a firming peso, which have forced the government to launch a bailout program. At the end of 2012, around 500,000 sacks of Colombian coffee had not been exported due to low prices, Munoz said, adding that he expected those beans to start being released in January.
Globally, demand for increasingly scarce high-quality beans from Colombia has increased. In December, market sources told Reuters that commodity trader Louis Dreyfus had embarked on a buying spree of Colombian beans. The federation expects output to rise to 10 million bags or more this year as new trees enter production. It takes about three years for newly planted trees to start bearing fruit. Colombia renovated around 245,000 hectares between 2011 and 2012 and it expects to complete another 100,000 hectares this year, Munoz said. "If we hadn't renovated at the rate we did, there would have been a national tragedy," he said.
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