Improved husbandry and an increased availability of fertiliser and pesticides were helping to boost production, the general manager of the Burundi Coffee Office (OCIBU), Barthelemy Niyikiza, said. Many farmers -- formerly displaced by insecurity in the tiny war-torn nation -- were able to return to their fields last year and resume tending previously abandoned coffee trees, Niyikiza said. "The quality and quantity of the 1998-99 crop will be higher than last year because there has been better maintenance and we have been able to distribute fertiliser and treat trees with pesticides," Niyikiza said. "In previous years, many farmers were displaced and could not work their fields, so the coffee was not maintained and the trees were abandoned. "But now the peasants have started to return to their fields."

Traders said the final 100 tonnes from 1997-98 wouldbe sold at auction in the capital Bujumbura on Friday. The weekly auction had been delayed two days because of National holidays on Wednesday and Thursday, traders said.

Officials at OCIBU, the state-run organisation responsible for selling Burundi's crop of mostly arabica coffee, said the 1998-99 crop was being harvested and sales would probably start in August. Production reached a peak of 41,000 tonnes in 1994-95, but has steadily declined since then because of a civil war that has claimed an estimated 150,000 lives since 1993. Output levels were further sapped when neighbouring countries imposed a trade embargo on the land-locked nation in mid-1996 to punish a military coup.

The embargo cut off access to pesticides and fertiliser, but OCIBU officials say those supplies are arriving again. Niyikiza said OCIBU would start treating trees with pesticides and begin distributing fertiliser this month in the hope of boosting production for the 1999-2000 crop, forecast at 30,000 tonnes.