Brazil’s 2023/24 coffee crop will grow only modestly, says Taka Insights

NEW YORK, June 8 (Reuters) – Brazil, the world’s leading coffee producer, will have a larger crop in 2023/24 (July-June), according to commodity intelligence firm Taka Insights. However, the increase will be modest and far from the record production that some analysts had anticipated.

The company, which creates daily crop prediction models using remote sensing and weather station data, predicted that Brazil’s 2023/24 (July-June) arabica coffee production would be 40.68 million 60-kg bags, a slight increase from the current crop of 38.48 million bags.

“This may come as a surprise to those who anticipated a much greater recovery following a few months of well-above-average rainfall, but the NDVI clearly demonstrates the extreme moisture deficit at the beginning of the vegetative growth cycle,” the company said in a note sent to Reuters.

Normalized Difference Vegetation Index (NDVI) is a method for measuring the green vegetation of trees that is regarded as an effective predictor of crop yield.

Co-founder of the Taka Insights coffee programme and analyst of soft commodities, Judith Ganes, stated that daily data collection now covers close to 75 percent of the arabica area in Brazil.

She stated that arabica trees in Brazil are still recovering from a severe drought and frost in 2021, so they are unable to produce a crop comparable to the record yield observed in the 2020/21 growing season.

Arabica coffee trees account for approximately two-thirds of total production, with robusta coffee trees accounting for the remainder.

Taka Insights is still in the process of mapping the proportion of robusta in Brazilian coffee production.

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