Abidjan, April 21 - Ivory Coast will harvest 1 million tonnes of cocoa during the 2008/09 season, down from 1.36 million last season, but exports will range between 1.1 and 1.2 million tonnes of beans, the head of the country's cocoa administrator said on Monday.
This season in the world's biggest grower has been hit by bad weather, disease, strikes and adminstrative chaos. But Gilbert Ano N'Guessan, head of the committee which manages the cocoa sector, said exports would be boosted by cocoa stocks left over from last year.
"We will be between 1.1 million and 1.2 million tonnes of cocoa for export ... production itself for the full season will be 1 million," he told reporters at an industry meeting.
Expectations that the Ivorian harvest would be lower than in 2007/08 helped support cocoa prices in late 2008 and early this year, making it among the best performing commodities on world markets. Benchmark futures for delivery in July traded at 1,720 pounds per tonne in London on Monday, down around 3 percent since the start of the year.
Last November, N'Guessan forecast a crop of at least 1 million tonnes after the start of the October-March main crop had been disrupted by, among other factors, a reorganisation of management structures in response to a probe into corruption at the Coffee and Cocoa Bourse, which oversees the sector.
Arrivals of beans at the West African country's two ports reached 911,000 tonnes by April 19, exporters estimated on Monday, down from almost 1.1 million at the same time last season.
Shippers are closely watching the development of the April-September mid crop, with cocoa from that expected to begin arriving in early May.