Exclusive: Brazil weighs offering coffee options to support prices - sources
The Brazilian government is considering offering put options to coffee producers as a way to shore up prices at a 13-year low and assure a minimum income for struggling farmers, two people with knowledge of the talks told Reuters on Thursday. The program, if approved, would give producers the right to sell their crops to the government at a fixed price, setting a floor for coffee prices in the world's largest coffee producer and exporter. That would likely force buyers to pay more for Brazilian coffee and encourage other coffee-growing countries to follow suit. Producers have been pressuring Brasilia to offer put options and rebuild government bean inventories that had been sold off earlier this decade. "We have talked to the government and they liked the idea," a director at a Brazilian coffee cooperative told Reuters. "It would be a win-win program. Farmers can be guaranteed better prices, and the government can later profit from the sales o...