New Delhi - A labour shortfall of around 30%-35% will likely slow India's coffee harvest this crop year, which started October 1, a senior industry executive said Thursday. Many workers have moved to construction sites, meaning the harvest will take longer and coffee shrubs will have less time to recover before the next flowering and crop. "This usually leads to poorer quality coffee cherries," said Ramesh Rajah, president of the Indian Coffee Exporters' Association. "Also, when labour is tight, cherries tend to be picked while they are still green. "Getting sufficient labour is our biggest headache today. Most farms have reported that despite offering higher wages, they have less labour than required," he said. Around 1.78 million workers are needed to pick the 355,000 hectares of coffee plantations throughout India - Asia's third-largest producer of coffee. "A lot of the men have left for plantations while women have left for the textile industry. Basically, workers are leaving the hills for the plains and the cities where conditions are not so cold and more modern," said Rajah. Workers can earn around Rs 150 a day at construction sites in Bangalore or on nearby road projects, while coffee farms now pay around Rs 90 a day. This is already up from Rs 75 a day in previous years, although Rajah said that coffee pickers can earn as much as Rs 250 a day by picking more cherries. However, most of the workers now in the coffee fields are in their 50s, he said. To make up for the labour shortfall, coffee farms have started to source labour from the poorer state of Bihar in central eastern India. "Around 500 workers from Bihar have arrived to work at coffee fields on a trial basis. We'll have to see how they adjust as they have no experience in picking coffee cherries and will also have to acclimatize to the colder climate in the coffee highlands, which can be extremely cold and difficult during winter in December and January," said Rajah. The association projects India's coffee output may decline by seven per cent to 274,000 metric tons this crop year because of insufficient rainfall during the cherry ripening period.

[Source: Dow Jones Newswire]