Vietnam's coffee trade has slowed to a trickle in the past week due to supply shortages in the period between crops, traders said on Tuesday. "The best estimate is that there is around 20,000 tonnes of robusta beans left in Daklak," said a trader in Buon Ma Thuot, the capital of top coffee growing Daklak province.
He said his firm had switched to trading peppers and corn until October when new beans from the harvest of the next coffee crop become available. Vietnamese coffee prices edged up to 28,000 dong ($1.7) per kg from 27,700 dong last week. That compared with 28,600-28,700 dong per kg about two weeks ago.
Exporters offered new crop's robusta for delivery in December at discounts of $70 a tonne to September for prompt shipment. "We could only do small export contracts now as there are just not enough beans, our daily purchase from growers drops to about just five to 10 tonnes," another trader in Daklak said.
Vietnam is expected to start harvesting from late October. The harvest ends in January while the crop year lasts between October 2007 and September 2008. A Reuters poll of coffee traders estimated that Vietnam will produce 17.4 million 60-kg bags in the upcoming crop, from a range of 15.5 million bags to 18.5 million bags.
The last harvest may have produced 21 million bags, or 56 percent above the crop that ended last September. Robusta exports from October 2006 through last month jumped 49.2 percent from a year earlier to 17.6 million bags. One coffee bag has 60 kg.