Brazil's coffee harvest last year was hit by one the country's worst droughts in decades, with effects on the world's largest producer now threatening to spill over into this year, pushing prices ever higher.
Brazil's 290,000 growers produce around a third of the world's coffee - out-producing the country's nearest competitor, Vietnam, by more than three times.
But last year's total yield was down 7.7 per cent from 2013 and well below initial forecasts, the ministry of agriculture said this week.
Production of high grade arabica slumped even more drastically, by 15 per cent.
The falling production has sent prices soaring, with arabica up by half in 2014 and expected to keep increasing this year.
A pound of arabica for March delivery was fetching around $US1.77 ($A1.92) on New York's ICE Futures US market Thursday, compared to around $US1.06 a year earlier.
Unlike many crops that are replanted and harvested each year, coffee is grown in a two-year cycle. So initial predictions for 2014, made before the drought took hold, had initially forecast a much stronger harvest.
"This harvest was all set to be a bumper one, given many plantations were new and cultivators had invested to increase productivity," said Gil Barabach of Safras & Mercado specialist news agency.
"At the end of 2013 we expected production to hit 60 to 65 million sacks," Barabach said.
The final total, measured in 60-kilogram bags, was actually just 45.3 million, thanks in large part to severe rain shortages in south and central south Brazil, the country's main production centres, that stretched from the first weeks of last year through November.
"Annual rainfall normally comes in at between 1,600 millimetres (63 inches) to 1,800 millimetres," said Paulo Sergio Elias, a spokesman for a coffee growing cooperative of some 3,000 producers in Minas Gerais, north of Sao Paulo and Rio states.
But rainfall last year "didn't even reach 900 millimetres," Elias said.
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