Cocoa Shortage Seen Expanding as Chocolate Sales Advance Cocoa demand will exceed supply for a second year in the season that starts Oct. 1 as West African output shrinks and chocolate sales expand to a record. Production will be 118,000 metric tons smaller than consumption in 2013-14, on top of a shortage of 98,000 tons this year, according to the mean in a Bloomberg survey of nine traders, grinders and analysts. The deficit was 87,000 tons in 2011-12, the International Cocoa Organization estimates. Chocolate sales will rise 6.2 percent to $117 billion next year, researcher Euromonitor International Ltd. forecasts. Futures rose to the highest in almost a year in London on Sept. 5, entering a bull market. Dry weather in Ivory Coast, the largest producer, may damage next season’s main crop, the bigger of two annual harvests, and output in neighboring Ghana may contract as the government cuts spending on pesticides. “We’ve seen production not as strong as two years ago, so the stocks are being absorbed by the market,” Francisco Redruello, a senior food analyst at London-based Euromonitor, said in a Sept. 9 interview. “There was some dry weather before the main crop and we are now seeing some more humid conditions, but we would be very, very surprised to have a bumper crop of cocoa beans.” Cocoa gained 16 percent in London and 15 percent in New York this year. The beans are the second-best performer in the Standard & Poor’s GSCI gauge of 24 raw materials, after crude oil. Stockpiles monitored by the NYSE Liffe exchange were 139,880 tons on Sept. 2, a 58 percent slump from an almost two-year high in September 2010, bourse data show. bloomberg/news/2013-09-12/cocoa-shortage-seen-expanding-as-chocolate-sales-advance.html
Posted on: Thu, 12 Sep 2013 05:35:56 +0000
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