Bangkok, Oct 30 - The sugar crushing season in Thailand, Asia's top producer, may be delayed by as much as one month due to a fall in world sugar prices, traders and industry officials said on Thursday.
Crushing, which usually begins in early November, may not begin until December this year as millers resist putting new Thai supply onto a depressed world market, risking the ire of farmers who are waiting to collect on their crops.
"We just want to wait for a while and start crushing when prices are a bit higher than the current level," a trader at one major Thai milling firm told Reuters.
An official at the Thai Sugar Millers Corporation told Reuters that millers would meet on Nov. 3 to set a date for beginning the crushing season.
The crushing delay was unlikely to last beyond a month, traders said, predicting that farmers would stage protests because millers were not buying their cane.
Although world sugar prices have tumbled by as much as a third since hitting a near two-year high in March, they rebounded this week and the market has held up far better than most other commodities, which have halved, or more, from the records.
New York raw sugar futures for March delivery <SBH9> finished at 12.09 cents per lb on Wednesday, down from this year's high of just over 15 cents in early March. They had hit a four-month low last Friday due to fears of falling demand in a recession.
Thailand is forecast to produce 7.2 million tonnes of sugar in 2008/09, according to the government's latest survey in mid-October. That is slightly below the previous forecast of 7.4 million tonnes as dry weather hit some cane growing regions.
Traders expect Thailand to export about 4 million tonnes of sugar in 2008, slightly less than the global market deficit expected in the 2008/2009 year by consultants Kingsman.