Jorge Cardenas, head of the National Federation of Coffee Growers, addressed reporters on Wednesday, a day after finance minister Juan Camilo Restrepo first broached the topic of Colombia importing coffee for the first time.

"It's possible at some point, in order to meet commitments for exports of soluble and processed coffees produced in Colombia, that part of the raw material will be imported," Cardenas told reporters. Cardenas stressed that any use of imported beans would be limited to products such as instant or freeze-dried coffees, however, and said the bulk of Colombia's exports would continue to be 100-percent Colombian grown.

"This doesn't mean that the country is going to be drinking Brazilian coffee or that we're going to fill our export quota with Brazilian,Ecuadorean or Peruvian coffees," he said.

Cardenas did not elaborate on the quantities of beans that Colombia may be forced to purchase from rival producers, a concept that once would have seemed as odd as bringing coal to Newcastle.

Late Tuesday, Restrepo told the Senate, "(Coffee) inventories have been falling to levels that are very low (and) at this point stand at 3 million (60 kg) bags, the lowest in the last 20 years."

"Taking into account that the (1999/2000) crop is going to be small, it's possible that coffee will have to be imported," he added. "If we don't improve, if we don't increase production...we will have to import to...avoid affecting exports in a direct way."

Unusually heavy rains during the flowering period cut Colombia's 1998/99 crop by 10.3 per cent, to a total of 10.86 million bags from 12.1 million bags in 1997/98. The same rains, stemming from the La Nina weather pattern which causes a cooling of ocean currents in the Pacific, have hammered Colombia throughout most of the 1999calendar year and show no signs of abating anytime soon.

Underscoring the damage from the rains, the federation reported last week that output in October, the first month of the 1999/2000 crop cycle, fell by more than 50 per cent.

Production for the month, the lowest in at least a decade, totalled 741,000 bags compared to 1.51 million bags in October last year, the federation said. For the first 10 months of the current calendar year, the federation said coffee production totalled 7.34 million bags, down 26.7 per cent from 10.02 million bags in January-October 1998.