Vietnam

Vietnamese exporters have been accused of delaying shipments of at least 80,000 tons of coffee after London’s Liffe saw falls that caused farmers to hold off selling their coffee.

Some roasters, anxious to avoid being caught short, turned to Indonesia to fulfill their orders.

According to reports, farmers demanded London prices for their beans but exporters, claiming that there were "ample supplies", were only willing to take robusta at discounted prices, despite the harvest having been completed some months previously.

The Vietnam Coffee and Cocoa Association (VICOFA) has asked exporters to halt sales of coffee from Vietnam’s next 2009/2010 crop in a bid to boost prices.

Adding to concerns is the news that Vietnamese coffee production is slated to be affected by difficult weather conditions.

"Unseasonal rains at the flowering stage and predicted dry weather will impact production, said VICOFA chairman Luong Van Tu.

He noted that the productive acreage has also gone down after plantation owners replanted some of the older plantations where the yield had fallen off. He said it was hard to predict by how much the crop will decrease, but said it was "certain that the output will be lower than the 16 million bags estimated in the 2008-09 crop year. We’ll have more information in September; it’s hard to say now how much production will fall," Tu said, adding that exports will decline further in the coming months as better quality coffee is available in the market from other coffee-producing nations.

However, predictions of dry weather affecting the crop have turned out to be larelgey baseless as wetter weather has actually been the norm, easing concerns about crop damage due to rains during the flowering period, according to traders from the Central Highlands province of Dak Lak.

"The weather has been favorable for crops in general and coffee in particular," said the manager of an import-export firm from the Central Highlands province of Dak Lak. "There were rains when most of the trees were making fruits."

"We have had good weather," added a coffee company director based in Buon Ma Thuot. "The rains will help farmers who have dwindling stockpiles left from the last harvest. Farmers will gather and dry the coffee now on bushes from about October," he said.