Tegucigalpa, Jan 19 - A booming trade in contraband coffee smuggled into Guatemala could leave Honduras short of the caffeine-packed bean, hitting export income, industry leaders said on Friday.
Officials at the national coffee institute said Honduran growers were taking advantage of higher prices paid for Guatemalan coffee and smuggling their beans across the border.
"Illegal coffee trafficking to Guatemala is happening on a daily basis at customs' blind spots. Truck loads of our high-quality beans slip over the border," institute head Asterio Reyes told Reuters.
Exporters say that while some Honduran farmers may get rich from the contraband, the industry's income suffers as a whole and the illegal trade threatens export contracts, tarnishing the country's reputation as a reliable producer.
Guatemala is famed for its gourmet coffee beans grown at high altitudes and is the largest coffee exporter in Central America, followed by Honduras.
Honduran coffee exporters say their beans are penalized by traders who consider them of lower quality, so many farmers look for higher prices across the border, where the beans are mixed in with the Guatemalan crop.
Guatemala coffee officials said they had no knowledge of the problem.
During December of last year and the first weeks of 2009, some 230,000 60-kg bags of coffee have been sent illegally to Guatemala, estimates the institute.
If smuggling continues as such a clip, Honduras is worried it will not meet its forecast to export 3.6 million bags of coffee during the 2008/09 season.
"If this pace of illegal trafficking of coffee doesn't stop the export estimates will be off," Luis Lopez, head of the Honduras' exporters association, said.
Honduras has so far exported 211,883 bags of coffee in the 2008/09 coffee year, which began in October, down 17.86 percent from the same period in the previous cycle as bad weather hit production, said the the national coffee institute.