Felix looms over Central America coffee crops

(Adds quotes, detail on Costa Rica)

By Brian Harris

MANAGUA, Sept 4 (Reuters) - Pounding rain from Hurricane Felix could hurt Nicaragua's coffee crop, but was seen largely sparing plantations in Honduras and Guatemala, exporter and grower associations said on Tuesday.

Hurricanes can wreak havoc with Central America's valued coffee crop, and coffee prices surged in London and New York on speculative buying as Felix made landfall in Nicaragua as a potentially devastating Category 5 storm.

Felix, which later slowed to a Category 1 storm, was not forecast to directly hit Nicaragua's coffee crops, but growers were concerned about heavy rainfall, EXCAN General Manager Conny Perez said.

"It depends how much water falls, but if there's a lot, it could cause damage," Perez told Reuters at the RAMACAFE industry meeting in the Nicaraguan capital.

EXCAN groups large private coffee exporters and is responsible for 80 percent of Nicaragua's coffee exports.

Farmers at the RAMACAFE meeting said it was too early in the crop cycle for rain to overload cherries with water and force them off trees but hard rain could still hurt the crop.

The full extent of damage may not be known until harvesting starts in November, when defective beans are detected in processing. Damage to the root systems of coffee trees and erosion of nutrients from the soil will take longer to spot.

Walter Navas, executive director of Nicaragua's National Coffee Council, was more pessimistic, saying up to half the expected 2007/08 crop of 1.5 million 60 kg bags could be hit.

"It is already raining heavily," he told Reuters as the storm pummeled northern Nicaragua. "This could take half of the production. It's definitely going to have an effect."

Farmers at RAMACAFE fretted about landslides. Some, like Jose Ramon Zeledon, who owns an 18-hectare farm in the mountains outside the northern town of Jinotega, decided to leave the meeting early to go home and check on damage.

Growers across the region were worried about damage to vital jeep trails, which are used to whiz harvested cherries from farms to depulping facilities before the beans spoil.

HONDURAS, GUATEMALA SEEN DODGING HARM

In Honduras, the IHCAFE coffee institute said Felix should leave crops unscathed as it was set to miss major plantations.

"The way the hurricane is moving, I do not think there will be any problem, "IHCAFE manager David Valeriano said.

Jose Angel Saavedra of the National Coffee Producers' Association said Honduras' rugged mountains should blunt most of Felix's winds before the storm reached the key coffee growing region near the Guatemalan border.

Crops in Guatemala, the region's top coffee exporter, were also seen emerging largely unharmed.

"Right now, water is no problem. On the contrary, it will help (crops) grow. But our major concern is infrastructure damage," Christian Rasch, president of the National Coffee Association, or Anacafe, told Reuters.

In Costa Rica, where harvesting has begun in the south, sunny skies alleviated fears that Felix could cause an upper atmosphere disturbance and trigger heavy rain near the border with Panama -- a common phenomenon when storms strike the northern half of Central America.

Nicaragua and Honduras respectively shipped 2.93 million and 1.36 million 60-kg bags of coffee in the 2005/06 harvest.

In October 2005, Hurricane Stan killed more than 2,000 people in Central America and destroyed close to 10 percent of Guatemala's coffee crop when heavy rains knocked fruit off trees and destroyed water systems and roads.

(Additional reporting by Noel Randewich in Tegucigalpa)