Coffee Growers to Talk About Retiring Low-Quality Beans

Coffee growers from Central America, Mexico and Peru will meet in Costa Rica on Thursday to finalize accords on how much of the region’s lower-quality beans will be retired from global export markets. The measure goes above and beyond global agreements by coffee-producing nations to hold back about 20% of exports in an effort to boost prices, which have been hovering stubbornly near six-year lows amid an international coffee glut. Honduras, which produces about 3 million bags of coffee a year, expects to recall about 300,000 bags of low-quality beans from export markets, effectively doubling the amount of Honduran coffee removed from stocks that were originally slated for export, said Juan Jose Osorio of the Honduran Coffee Institute. Meetings on Thursday are expected to result in decisions from the other nations in the Central American coffee bloc about how much lower-quality coffee they will remove. Osorio said agreements could force a drop of as much as 10% in export forecasts for the region, which produces about 20 million bags of coffee a year.