Guatemala, El Salvador
Say Coffee Safe from Cold
GUATEMALA - Guatemala's coffee harvest was
not hurt by unusually cold weather in recent
days, said the national coffee association
on Wednesday, while neighboring El Salvador
said its crops were also spared serious
damage.
Technical experts from Guatemala's coffee
organization Anacafe completed an evaluation
of farms around the country and found that
while beans were not damaged, the harvest
could be delayed.
"The information we have shows the areas
where coffee is still maturing are not
reporting damages from the low temperatures,
only that there will be some delays,"
Anacafe said in a statement. But the
estimate for the size of the overall 2009/10
crop, with 4.1 million 60-kg bags of
production and 3.68 million in exports, will
stay the same.
Guatemala is Central America's largest
coffee producer.
Neighboring El Salvador was hit over the
weekend by high winds, part of the cold
front affecting the United States and Mexico
but the national coffee organization said
the impact were not serious.
"Preliminary results show the winds
minimally impacted the cherries and the
foliage in the majority of coffee-growing
regions," a statement from El Salvador's
coffee council said.
Mexico, which produced 4.6 million bags of
coffee in the 2008/09 season, sees losses
due to below-freezing temperatures in some
of the high-altitude growing regions.
Rodolfo Trampe, the head of the national
coffee association Amecafe linked to the
government, told Reuters the evaluations of
the affected areas were still underway and
it was too soon to quantify the damages.
Trampe said next week Amecafe would have a
better idea of the scope of the problem.
But the independent national union of coffee
producers, which groups more than 220,000
growers around the country, has said up to
80,000 60-kg have been affected as the cold
hurt the quality of the beans or prevented
the cherries from maturing.
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