HANOI: Lower global prices have prompted coffee growers in Vietnam, the world’s largest robusta producer, to ease the pace of cherry picking this week, traders and a farmer said on Tuesday. A surge in robusta coffee futures to an eight-week peak last Thursday propelled sales of Vietnamese coffee, while the country was still sitting on a record carryover stock estimated at up to 500,000 tonnes.
Coffee futures lost ground on Monday on forecasts of wet weather in top producer Brazil that raise the prospects of healthy flowering of crops, and its softer currency also encouraged producer selling. ICE January robusta contract ended down 1.2 percent at $1,600 a tonne. Tracking the falls, Vietnamese robusta fell to 35,100-35,800 dong ($1.57-$1.60) per kg on Tuesday in Daklak, the country’s biggest growing province, from 36,000-36,200 dong a week ago.
“Prices are low now and farmers, who could have begun to harvest more this week, have opted not to do so,” a grower in Daklak’s district of Cu M’gar said. Exporters sought to sell Vietnamese robusta grade 2, 5 percent black and broken at a premium of $40 a tonne to the January contact this week for loading in December, against premiums of $30-$40 a tonne last Tuesday.
At the same time last year the beans were offered at discounts of $80-$90 a tonne. Trading has slowed because of the latest price drops, but recent sales could boost Vietnam’s coffee exports next month, a Vietnamese trader at a European firm in Ho Chi Minh City said. He added that most of the coffee being loaded this month and in November will still come from the 2014/2015 crop that ended in September.
Coffee is Vietnam’s second-biggest earner among agricultural produce after shrimp and fish. The bitter beans, used mostly for making soluble coffee, brought in $3.55 billion last year while earnings in the first nine months of this year totalled nearly $2 billion.
