Los Naranjos, April 10 - Well ordered rains have brought coffee trees across El Salvador's main growing regions into flower this week, raising the chances that the 2007/08 coffee harvest will be the largest in years.
"In all the growing zones, we are seeing a very promising and good flowering," Angel Cabrera, research manager for the El Salvadoran Coffee Research Foundation, or Procafe, which produces official coffee crop estimates, said on Tuesday.
Sparked by rainfall on time late in March, the small flowers have emerged in massive amounts, giving the lush, green tropical countryside a snow-like dusting of white petals.
Assuming regular rains arrive as forecast in the next few weeks, these flowers will leave in their place cherries that will become the next coffee crop.
"If there are no unforeseen phenomenon, plantations are showing signs of a large harvest," Cabrera told Reuters.
Cabrera said he sees a 2007/08 crop no smaller than 1.5 million 60-kg bags, or at least 15 percent larger than the recently-concluded 2006/07 harvest of 1.3 million bags, the country's smallest in over 50 years.
While the flowering this week is the largest of the year, a final flowering is expected in another three to four weeks, which will allow Cabrera to make a more fact-based crop estimate.
He will issue the first scientific crop estimate in July,
Following the eruption of the Ilamatepec volcano in October 2005, the San Rafael cooperative farm outside of the town of Los Naranjos, 44 miles (70 km) west of San Salvador, has suffered two abysmally low crops.
Now, cooperative president Manfreis Chavez says flowering is strong enough for the farm's members to expect a return to pre-eruption production levels.
"This upcoming harvest looks good," he said as he examined flowering trees. He estimated the flowers would lead to an output of about 15 bags per hectare.
"We are very happy to see this after producing under one bag per hectare (last harvest)," he said.
Coffee production has fallen sharply in El Salvador since the mid-1990's as low prices and urban expansion have whittled away at the area planted with coffee.
On Monday, El Salvadoran Coffee Council manager Ricardo Espitia said that since 1999 the country has seen up to 10 percent of its planted area either abandoned by farmers or converted to residential use.