Coffee producers wish to promote consumption to increase income in the sector

São Paulo – One of the decisions of the 2nd World Coffee Conference, which took place this weekend in Salvador, city in the northeastern Brazilian state of Bahia, was to stimulate the consumption of the product. In the participants’ evaluation, this is the best strategy to bring more balance to the productive chain and increase coffee producers’ income, which make very little in comparison to the final price of the coffee sold to the consumer.

In order to achieve an increase in demand for coffee in the traditional markets, the need for launching new products and carrying out institutional programmes was discussed at the conference, like the project “Coffee and Health”. In the opinion of the participants, for the new markets, in turn, it is important to give an accessible price and show soluble coffee as an alternative. They also discussed the need to increase consumption within the producing countries themselves.

According to the minister of Agriculture and president of the conference, Roberto Rodrigues, the producer countries have to give added value to the product. A means for this would be industrialisation of coffee in these countries, since the industrialised product has a higher price than the raw material.

Amongst other subjects, the importance of the use of modern technologies for forecasting crops, stock control and demand projections was also discussed. The proposals presented during the World Coffee Conference will be analysed this week by the International Coffee Organisation (ICO).

The 2nd World Coffee Conference, which started on Saturday (23), counted on 1,100 people enrolled, where 486 were foreigners from 65 countries. The event was promoted by the Ministry of Agriculture, Livestock and Supply in partnership with the ICO and was organised by the Association of Farmers and Irrigators of Bahia (AIBA).

Brazil

Rodrigues remarked at the conference that the country plans on maintaining its participation of 40% in the world coffee market and defended the creation of mechanisms to organise the flow of crops. Current Brazilian productivity is of 15 bags per hectare and the idea is to increase it to 20 bags. According to the minister, the expectation is that world demand goes from 115 million bags per year to 130 million in 2010.

According to him, Brazil is going to reach the beginning of the next harvest, in April 2006, with one of the lowest coffee stock levels in the last decades. The demand for the Brazilian product is of about 42 million bags per year, where 27 million for the external market and 15 million for internal consumption.

At the opening of the event, president Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva said it is important to add value to the products and establish agreements in the link of the productive chain, so that there is a fairer discussion on the gains of each one over the final product’s value. “It’s not possible that countries that don’t produce one grain of coffee make more with coffee than the countries that produce coffee. This only happens, because in some way, we remained passive before this situation,” he stated.

*Translated by Silvia Lindsey