Coffee growers in Vietnam, Indonesia and India, three of the seven largest coffee-producing nations on earth, will harvest smaller crops — down by a combined 2.5 percent — due to drought magnified by the El Niño weather pattern, according to a USDA forecast. The semi-annual Coffee: World Markets and Trade report said a record crop of Arabica beans in Brazil, the world’s largest coffee grower, would lead to a modest rise in global production.
Brazil was forecast to grow nearly 56 million bags of coffee weighing 60 kg apiece, roughly 40 percent of the world total and a 12-percent increase from the previous year. Arabica beans, about 70 percent of the world production, are more flavorful but contain less caffeine than robusta, the other major variety. With global coffee consumption rising slowly, the world inventory is expected to drop to a four-year low at the end of the 2016/17 marketing year.
In Vietnam, the second-largest grower, production would fall 9 percent, to 27.3 million bags “as high temperatures combined with dry growing conditions between January and April 2016 to weaken yields,” said the USDA. It would be the second time in three years that hot and dry weather limited production, which was a record 29.8 million bags in 2013/14.
Severe drought throughout Indonesia, the fourth-largest grower, would pull down coffee production 8.5 percent, said USDA. “Dry weather disrupted the flowering and ripening stage of cherry formation and was most acutely felt in lowland areas of southern Sumatra and Java, where approximately 75 percent of the robusta crop is grown,” said the report.
For the second year in a row, the coffee harvest in India, the seven-largest grower, would drop by 100,000 bags, to 10 million bags. “Dry conditions during the flowering and fruit-set period weakened yields for both Arabica and robusta output,” said USDA.
Coffee production in Ethiopia, the largest grower in Africa and fifth-largest in the world, was forecast to hold steady at 6.5 million bags. The USDA attache in Addis Ababa wrote, “[T]here are reportedly smallholder highland farmers who have begun to grow coffee in areas that previously were not suitable for production” because of climate change, reported Agrimoney, which quoted the attache report as saying, “Researchers posit that Ethiopia’s coffee production could move to higher elevations as temperatures rise.” Attache reports are not official USDA data.