Mexico City, Nov. 29 - Mexico's coffee exports will drop 6.9 pct in 2007/08, but the country plans to boost production and promote coffee drinking nationally over the next decade, the Amecafe growers group said Thursday.
Mexico will export 2.7 million 60-kg bags of coffee in the recently started 2007/08 harvest, compared with 2.9 million bags in the last crop, Amecafe head Rodolfo Trampe told Reuters.
Trampe said Mexico will grow 4.2 million bags of coffee in the new harvest, down 6.7 percent from 2006/07 when a stronger market and government help raised output to 4.5 million bags.
Coffee trees often produce less fruit the year after a bumper crop.
"The last harvest was extraordinary," Trampe said. "Without a doubt, the recovery in international prices and government support to farmers (helped)."
Amecafe is a new private-sector coffee organization that includes farmers, roasters and exporters. It replaces Mexico's coffee council, which collapsed a few years ago after a corruption investigation.
Trampe said Amecafe had begun a five-year program to ramp up Mexico's output by renewing aging coffee trees and increasing care of plantations, without planting in new areas. He declined to give a figure for the planned increase in output.
Amecafe recently launched a new plan to increase coffee drinking within Mexico, in part by marketing high quality coffee from small Mexican producers in national coffee shops.
"Everything favors us developing this internal market," he said at an event to promote Cafe Punta del Cielo, a high-end Mexican coffee brand.
"We want to double consumption over the next 10 years," he said.
Mexican coffee quality has dropped in recent years as a lack of government attention and a long price crisis left many farms in disrepair.
A large proportion of Mexican coffee is now used for cheap, lower quality instant coffee sold in new coffee drinking countries.
"Every day Mexico becomes more of an industrialized coffee exporter, more than anything to emerging markets like Russia and China," he said.
Many coffee-growing nations are trying to boost domestic consumption to protect against market volatility.
Mexico, which used 1.6 million bags of its own coffee last year, has one of the world's lowest coffee consumption rates at about 1 kilo per year per person.
Trampe said Amecafe also planned to help set up a bank with private and government cash to improve access to credit for the coffee industry. He said the bank should open by the end of next year.