Arnoldo Lopez, president of the Costa Rican Coffee Institute (ICAFE) and spokesman for the CentAm group, said at the end of the one-day regional coffee meeting the secretariat would start operating in Guatemala within one month.

Lopez also said the five Central American nations - Costa Rica, El Salvador, Guatemala, Honduras and Nicaragua - still had not ruled out the possibility of holding back coffee from the market to pressure weak international prices."We have not ruled out this export (retention) possibility in order to pressure the market," Lopez told Reuters, referring to the increased competition that already battered CentAm crops are facing from Brazil's crisis.

But he said the CentAm group had not discussed this issue in great detail.Lopez said the group discussed the economic crisis in theworld'slargest coffee producer, Brazil, but took no decision during the meeting, the first time the CentAm group had met since Hurricane Mitch devastated the region last year.

Lopez said the Central American Coffee Secretariat would be inaugurated in Guatemala, but the leadership would be rotated on an annual basis among the five countries and would not involve the creation of a new physical institution.

"I believe that the secretariat will start operating within something like one month. We believe that we in this way will be able to gain more influence in international coffee forums, at less costs," he said."This will deal with a permanent system of exchange ofinformation and permanent spreading of information about the volume of our crops, international coffee prices and the volume of exports," said Lopez. Coffee analysts have said a regional secretariat, if wellcoordinated by the whole group, in the long-term could provide a basis for the group to create its own auction system for their coffees. The fivenations together account for 13 to 15 per cent of global coffee output and considerably more of world coffee exports. Coffee is the top foreign exchange earner for most of the area's developing Speculation over whether markets would see an overfloat of exports from Brazil's 1998/99 bumper crop continued to dominate trade talk on Thursday after last week's shock devaluation in the Latin American giant's currency. Lopez welcomed a statement from the Brazilian Associationof Coffee Exporters (Abecafe), which earlier on Thursday said the currency crisis currently facing Latin America's biggest economy would not trigger a surge in exports.