Costa Rica is likely to produce 1.725 million 60-kg bags of coffee in the 2009/10 season, a 6.1 percent increase from the previous harvest, the head of the country's coffee institute said on Friday. Ronald Peters, the head of Icafe, told Reuters in an interview that the Central American country produced some 1.625 million bags of coffee in the 2008/09 coffee year.
The lowest output in more than a decade because of high production costs and bad weather. "Part of what impacted the crop was the adverse climate - in part the heavy rains in October and November, and in part disease," Peters said. Costa Rica lost approximately 5 percent of its 2008/09 harvest due to adverse weather, but is expecting a better harvest this year on good flowering and lower fertiliser costs.
Fertiliser prices shot up by 150 percent in the country last year when oil prices were at their highest, affecting how much farmers could use on their crops, he said. Costa Rica is also hampered by old coffee trees that have not been replaced and have lower yields, Peters said. To reverse the trend, the government is giving credits to producers to help them renovate their fields.