June 4 (Bloomberg) -- Brazil’s coffee crop, the world’s largest, escaped the threat of frost for this weekend and no damaging weather is likely for the next two weeks as a cold air mass moves away from producing areas, forecasters said.
Crops in Minas Gerais, Brazil’s biggest coffee-producing state, are free from a new frost threat until at least June 20, said Expedito Rebello, head of research at the government’s Meteorology Institute, known as Inmet. The strongest polar mass of this autumn in Brazil is moving north of crops in the country’s southeast, Rebello said.
“The worst is over, at least for now,” Rebello said today in a telephone interview from Brasilia.
Brazil’s coffee output will increase 23 percent in the year starting July 1 as trees enter the more productive phase of a two-year cycle, the U.S. Department of Agriculture said May 17. Production will climb to 55.3 million bags from 44.8 million in the previous 12 months, the USDA said.
Rains in the Minas Gerais region helped avert damage because frost usually occurs when skies are clear, Rebello said.
“While temperatures are expected to drop below normal this weekend and early next week, lows will not be nearly cold enough to cause frost across the coffee belt,” Kyle Tapley, an meteorologist at Rockville, Maryland-based MDA EarthSat, said in an e-mail response to questions today.
Arabica coffee for July delivery fell 1.35 cents, or 1 percent, to $1.3425 a pound at 11:13 a.m. on ICE Futures U.S. in New York.
To contact the reporters on this story: Lucia Kassai in Sao Paulo at lkassai@bloomberg.net; Debarati Roy in New York at droy5@bloomberg.net
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