Mercados dinámicos de café: pronóstico de importación de Estados Unidos

For many countries, coffee exports are vital to foreign exchange earnings and represent important part of GDP. The objective was to predict U.S. green coffee imports for the next four years until 2014 in order to suggest recommendations that are useful for coffee producers in the planning process and avoid excesses or shortages in product inventories and achieve maximum profits. Multiple linear regression analysis and confidence intervals and predictions intervals were used. The independent variables used were: per capita consumption of coffee, price of coffee, soft drink to food expense ratio, per capita income, U.S. exports and domestic production, and time. The time series was 20 years. The main factors affecting imports of coffee were consumption per capita and the time variable. Model predictions of coffee imports by the United States had a high accuracy (average error of 4% below real imports). The import forecast U.S. coffee for the years 2011, 2012, 2013 and 2014 are: 1,343,110; 1,401,376; 1,459,642; and 1,517,909 tons, respectively. This might suggest to the Ministries of Agriculture of exporting countries to promote incentive plans to increase the number of hectares planted, and countries like Brazil, Vietnam, Colombia, Guatemala and Mexico could increase 12,982; 4,468; 12,783; 4,198 and 8,458 hectares respectively.