Vietnam joined representatives from 80 other coffee importers and exporters worldwide at the 107 th session of the International Coffee Organisation (ICO) in London from Sept. 26-30.

During the session, the delegates discussed the apparatus of the ICO in the new tenure, assessed the situation in the world market and made forecasts on world coffee outputs in the 2011-2012 crop.

According to the ICO statistics, in 2010, the world’s total coffee exports reached 92.5 million bags (60kg per bag). Brazil is the largest coffee exporter in the globe with over 30 million bags per year, followed by Vietnam with 16 million bags per year.

The EU is known as the largest coffee importer with an average volume of 67.5 million bags per year in the recent four years.

Talking on the sidelines of the session, President of the Vietnam Coffee and Cocoa Association Luong Van Tu said that the world’s coffee output in the 2011-2012 crop is forecast to decrease due to the impacts of climate change and degraded coffee areas in some countries, including Brazil, Colombia and Vietnam.

Coffee supplies will not meet demands as more young people in the world take to the drink, he added.

According to Tu, the country is building a strategy to increase the proportion of processed coffee in the total annual output to 20 percent by 2020.

During the conference, the Vietnamese delegation, led by Deputy Minister of Agriculture and Rural Development Ho Xuan Hung, worked with the delegation of Brazil ’s Ministry of Agriculture on measures to strengthen cooperation between the two countries. The delegation also met with ICO officials and trade partners./.