"The lost coffee will be considerable," Bryan Lewin, chief economist for the APPC, said in a presentation in Costa Rica.

"We still have to wait for flowering to forecast the behaviour of the harvest. But we have trustworthy information that enormous areas of the harvest have been affected by drought."

On Tuesday Manuel Bertone, vice president of Brazil's National Coffee Council, said Brazil's 2000/2001 crop, which begins harvesting in May next year, is seen below 30 million 60-kg bags. This is as much as 25 percent lower than originally forecast, because of the drought.

Lewin, speaking to Costa Rican producers at the end of the International Coffee Week (Sintercafe) in San Jose, said the drought was the most serious to hit Brazil's coffee crop in 40 years and would mostly affect high-qualitycoffees.

Lewin said, however that the harvest after the 2000/2001 harvest could rebound and be much higher.

"The most serious droughts that we remember in Brazil, those of 1964 and 1985, were followed by very good years, where the harvests even tripled, and we have to keep that in mind," Lewin said.