San Jose, Costa Rica, June 15 - The full damage from last year's eruption of the Ilamatepec volcano will not be felt until the upcoming 2006/07 coffee harvest, El Salvador's top coffee agronomist said on Thursday.
Carlos Alberto Pleitez, the technical manager of El Salvador's Coffee Research Foundation, said that since the volcano erupted last October, coffee trees on its slopes have been recovering lost foliage, leaving less energy for producing cherries, with poor flowering recorded in the area.
He said production losses in the region affected by the eruption would top 61,000 60-kg bags.
El Salvador expects its 2006/07 crop to be 1.55 million bags, up 3.7 percent from 2005/06.
The eruption, which hit less than two months before harvesting in the affected area was scheduled to begin, caused losses of 26,800 bags in the 2005/06 harvest.
The Ilamatepec volcano, also known as Santa Ana, hurled out hot rocks, ash and boiling water in October last year.
Ilamatepec is the largest of El Salvador's 23 volcanoes and stands 7,800 feet (2,380 meters) above sea level.
El Salvador's coffee is prized by gourmet buyers partly because of rich nutrients in the country's volcanic soil, but volcanic ash can carry levels of sulfur lethal to plants.
Pleitez, speaking to Reuters by telephone from El Salvador, said that once trees recover foliage lost when the volcano spewed ash over a large portion of coffee-rich western El Salvador, growers in the region can expect record crops thanks to the nutrients added to the soil by the ash.
That process could take until the fourth harvest after the eruption, he added.
Although the eruption struck before last year's harvest, most of the crop was salvaged because trees had already begun producing cherries. Rains from Hurricane Stan, which struck Central America a week after the eruption, also helped by washing ash off the trees.