Honduras 2008-09 coffee sales -13% to July 27 to 2.98m bags

29-07-2009

Honduras’s coffee industry has logged contracts for 2,980,106 60-kilogram bags of coffee from the current 2008-09 crop in sales through July 27, the official Honduran Coffee Institute, or Ihcafe, said.

This is 13% lower than sales through the same date the year before, when 3,417,061 bags of the 2007-08 Honduran crop had been sold by July 27, Ihcafe said in a report, a copy of which was obtained by Dow Jones Newswires.

The volume of the 2008-09 crop sold to date is estimated at about 93% of Honduran coffee exports from this harvest, from which shipments are forecast to reach about 3.2 million bags out of production estimated at 3.373 million bags, Ihcafe said. The Central American coffee nation is known to be a “late seller” in the market, with sales for the new crop normally not starting in earnest until after the onset of picking in October.

But this year the harvest was delayed by weather complications and local exporters have said the crop is expected to end well below the forecast.