Ugandan coffee officials have revised their export forecast for the October 2009 to September 2010 season down to 3.1 million bags from 3.4 million previously, a source at the regulator said on Tuesday.
The country is one of the continent’s major exporters and mainly produces Robusta beans.
“From the first few months of the season we have seen declines and farmers in a number of areas say the drought is having a severe impact on their harvests,” said the source at the state-run Uganda Coffee Development Authority (UCDA).
“And, of course, the prices are still down because they haven’t fully recovered from economic crisis. These two factors influenced our review of the forecast.”
Year-on-year coffee exports plummeted 20.4% in January, dropping to 264,314 bags that fetched $25.4m from 332,211 bags in Jan. 2009 that earned $30.7m.
A draft report for January production last week indicated that “the widespread and prolonged drought that we experienced in 2009 hit at a critical time when the coffee beans were forming.”
Many of them, it added, never fully developed and just shrank and dropped off trees prematurely.
Coffee is the east African country’s top commodity export and a key earner of foreign exchange.
In 2009, Uganda experienced one of its worst droughts in recent years, which saw yields in other key commodities like tea and cotton drop substantially.
Meanwhile, Ugandan cocoa exports for the October 2009 to September 2010 season are forecast to grow 20 percent to about 18,000 tonnes due to higher prices and expanding acreage, a senior official said on Tuesday.
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