Poor Farmer

By Isis Almeida Bloomberg September 28, 2011   Brazil, the world’s largest coffee grower, may produce a record crop in the 2012-13 season, said the nation’s coffee exporters’ council, known as CeCafe. Output in the South American country will climb to 57 million to 58 million bags as trees enter the high-yielding half of a two-year cycle, said Guilherme Braga, head of CeCafe. The 2012-13 season starts in July next year. The 2011-12 harvest began in the summer and is expected to be 46 million to 47 million bags, he said. “If the weather is favorable and rains fall in the right period, production may be higher than in the previous high- yielding season,” Braga said today in an interview at the International Coffee Organization in London. “Producers also benefited from favorable prices during the current season and therefore applied more fertilizers and tended to the crop.” Dry weather earlier this year helped the harvest and the quality of beans, although rains ...

By Jean Guerrero Dow Jones Newswires September 28, 2011 MEXICO CITY -(Dow Jones)- Nestle SA (NESN.VX, NSRGY) is expanding its coffee operations in Mexico with a $15 million plan to establish its first coffee-propagation center in a coffee-producing country and locally develop 30 million coffee plants by 2020, company officials said Wednesday. Nestle signed an agreement with Mexico's National Institute of Forestry, Farming and Fishing Research and with the Mexican crop-technology-and-distribution company Agromod to expand on its Nescafe Plan announced in August of last year. The new public-private alliance raises Nestle's initial goal in Mexico of planting five million high-yielding coffee trees by 2015, which was part of its plan to distribute 220 million plants world-wide by 2020. It turns Agromod's current crop-propagation laboratory in the southern Mexican state of Chiapas into a local-development-and-distribution center for Nestle's coffee plants starting i...