Mexico City, Oct. 18 - Peruvian coffee exports in the now completed 2006-07 crop cycle ended with total shipments up 20% at 3,227,490 60-kilogram bags, the exporter-run Peruvian Coffee Chamber said Thursday.
This compares to total Peruvian exports of 2,684,201 bags in the October 2005-September 2006 crop year, the chamber said in a report, of which a copy was obtained by Dow Jones Newswires.
The figures are in line with industry expectations for the output from the harvest to be at least 15% higher than the previous 2005-06 cycle, during which shipments ended down 9.8% from 2004-05 exports of 2,974,323 bags.
Exports in the 2006-07 crop cycle from the South American nation, however, were in part higher because of the healthy crop harvested in Peru in calendar year 2006.
Even though Peru's coffee industry mostly calculates its annual coffee exports and production in calendar years, the months where the strongest export flow normally are recorded often overlap into the international cycle, hence providing a buffer between higher and lower cycles.
Physical harvesting of Peru's coffee crop starts about mid-March, some six months before the main mild washed arabica coffee crop in the rest of Latin America.
But exports normally don't start flowing to the market in earnest until June or July, so most of Peru's exports from the 2006 harvest are shipped during what is considered the 2006-07 crop cycle in international coffee statistics.
Peru has become an increasingly important producer of high-quality washed arabica coffee in recent years, raising annual production significantly from about 1.7 million bags in the mid-1990s to over 3.0 million bags currently.
It competes with Honduras to be the fourth-largest producer of washed arabica beans in Latin America after Colombia, Mexico and Guatemala.