Colombia Coffee Exports to Start Shipping from Caribbean Port (DJ)

The first shipment of coffee is scheduled to depart from Turbo on Tuesday, said Gabriel Silva, Fedecafe's general manager. Silva was speaking to reporters on the sidelines of Fedecafe's 68th annual congress.

The first shipment from Turbo, located in Colombia's northernmost banana-producing region of Uraba, near Panama, is part of a pilot scheme to test the port's suitability for coffee exports, Silva said.

"Turbo is closer to the coffee areas, and potentially cheaper than Cartagena," he said.

In the 2006-07 coffee year, 51% of Colombia's coffee exports left from the Caribbean port of Cartagena, 46% from the Pacific Port of Buenaventura, and 2.4% from the Caribbean port of Santa Marta, according to Fedecafe figures.

Turbo's port has traditionally been used by the region's banana companies. This is the first time it has been used for coffee, industry insiders said, but the potentially cost-saving new opportunity was immediately welcomed by the industry.

"Turbo has huge advantages. From some of the coffee areas to get to Cartagena is a trip of thousands of miles," said Juan Francisco Suarez, head of the Coffee Growers' Committee of Antioquia, Colombia's largest coffee-growing province.

"(Using Turbo) could cut the transport time in half, and the savings are potentially enormous. But work is still needed on the Medellin-Turbo highway to make it suitable for heavy trucks," Suarez told Dow Jones Newswires.

Both the ports of Buenaventura and Cartagena have been plagued by a series of problems in recent years, including severe congestion because of weather problems and strikes and security problems due to Colombia's ongoing armed conflict.