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Brazil Coffee Inventories Fell 31% in 2005 on Demand
Brazil, the world's biggest coffee producer and exporter, said coffee inventories fell 31 percent at the end of last year from a year earlier as rising international demand led farmers to boost sales.
Coffee stockpiles fell to 948,402 metric tons at the end of last year, the government's statistics agency said.
Brazilian coffee growers have avoided increasing planting and have reduced stockpiles in past years after a glut in 2000 and 2001 led prices to slump, the University of Sao Paulo's Margarete Boteon said.
`Producers have been more wary of heading for an overproduction situation,'' said Boteon, an analyst at the University of Sao Paulo's commodity research unit in Piracicaba, Brazil.`The trend for reducing stocks instead of boosting planting may well continue.''
Coffee farmers planted 2.34 million hectares (5.78 million acres) of the bitter-tasting beans for this year's crop, compared with 2.32 million hectares in the previous harvest and 2.36 million hectares in 2001, according to the statistics agency.
Output will rise this year mainly because this crop is the best-yielding one of a two-year cycle for Brazilian coffee trees, Boteon said. Production in the calendar year of 2006 will rise 21 percent to 2.58 million tons, according to the statistics agency.
The agency also said today that soybean inventories grew 17 percent from a year earlier to 3.24 million tons at the end of 2005. Corn inventories fell 22.5 percent to 5.17 million tons, the Rio de Janeiro-based agency said.
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