March 2012 C&CI • Brazil • 23


Next crop a large one but not a record-breaker


tightest supply-demand balance in history, the question is whether the new Brazilian crop will be big enough to make up for the shortfalls in supply elsewhere.


A


Row after row of new coffee trees domi- nate the countryside in Brazil’s Espirito Santo state. Most are barely 0.5m high, but the plants are already heavy with fruit, and industry officials have no doubt that the record yields producers are seeing in Espirito Santo will boost Brazilian produc- tion by about 5 million bags in the next five years.


"Look at the fields here, these farms all have average yields of 80-100 bags per hectare," said Evair Vieira, the director of the Espirito Santo Agriculture Ministry’s research institution Incaper.


Growing role for Espirito Santos


Although drought has reduced the forecast for production in Brazil’s leading coffee- growing state, Minas Gerais, its second largest producing state, Espirito Santo is making up for some of those losses. Overall, production in Espirito Santo is expected to be 12 million bags this year, up from 11.5 million bags last year and 10.5 million bags in 2010-2011. Production of Arabica has remained relatively stable, but it is the Conillon Robusta beans that are pushing the figures higher. "This year we are expecting to harvest 9.5 million bags of Conillon coffee, up from last year, when we had 8.5 million bags, and 7.6 million bags in the 2010-2011 cycle," Mr Vieira told C&CI.


Espirito Santo is home to 60,000 coffee producers and the state boasts impressive average yields of 36 bags per hectare, second in the world only to Vietnam. Even so, this is not enough for government and industry leaders, who want this yield to double and believe it is realistic to aim to do so.


lthough the new crop will provide much-needed relief to world markets that are still under pressure from the


As the world’s largest coffee grower approaches the start of the 2012-2013 harvest it is evident that this year will not be a record crop. As Maja Wallengren reports, although initial projections were of a crop of in excess of 60 million bags, forecasts have fallen steadily as flowers began developing into cherries


New coffee plantations in Espirito Santo


"Farmers here are highly productive and many have the potential to produce 150 bags per hectare where there are about 3,000-4,000 trees per hectare," said Paulo Volpi, the local manager of the Incaper research station in Marilandia, which is home to 1,200 producers with a production of about 300,000 bags.


Increasing yields


Mr Volpi said the goal is to see average yields reach 70 bags per hectare. This level of productivity would mean that even small growers with only a few hectares of coffee will be able to make a living.


"This project started in 1985 and today we have 30 research projects here. The potential is to get to 70 bags where cof- fee production is sustainable and eco- nomically viable," said Mr Volpi, who added that socio-economic dependency on coffee in Espirito Santo is higher than anywhere else in Brazil.


Of the state’s overall population of 3.5 million people, 320,000 work in coffee or a related business, and getting on for 30 per cent of the population depends on coffee as their main source of income. This puts the socio-economic importance of coffee to Espirito Santo on a par with Central American countries such as El Salvador and Guatemala.


Central to well-being


of the local economy "Everything here depends on coffee. This city was built on coffee and it has contin- ued to grow because of the income of cof- fee," said local grower Paulo Oliari. Mr Oliari explained how, when he first started growing coffee, he would only pro- duce 10 bags per hectare, and then slowly was able to increase productivity to 20 bags. "I had 20 bags, and that wasn’t really that bad, but with the coffee crisis it wasn’t enough because of the low prices, so 10


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