Brazilian President LuizInacio Lula da Silva urged coffee growers worldwide to join forces to negotiate a higher and more reasonable price for coffee producers during the opening ceremony of the Second World Coffee Conference on Saturday.

The conference, co-chaired by Brazilian Agricultural Ministry and the International Coffee Organization, is aimed at seeking a way out of the current crisis on the prices of coffee beans.

"Consuming countries have to understand the need to sit down atthe table for a negotiation in which the price is shared so that coffee becomes more money, " said Silva, president of the biggest producer and exporter of coffee in the world.

"We can't allow ourselves to be victims because we produce a little more," he added.

Roberto Rodrigues, Brazilian agricultural minister and president of the conference, briefed other countries on his country's experience in dealing with the crisis.

During the past several years, Brazil has taken a series of measures, including promoting the processing industry to increase the value of coffee exports, boosting domestic coffee consumption and expanding coffee exports to nontraditional coffee-consuming countries, to get rid of negative effects from the plunging pricesof coffee beans, he said.

In Latin America, Africa and Asia, more than 60 developing countries set the production and export of coffee beans as one of the main pillars of their economies, and are suffering from the dropping prices of coffee in the world market.

According to a report of the United Nations, the current priceof coffee beans is only one-third as much as the price 10 years ago. From the mid-1980s to the early 1990s, the export of coffee in producing countries stood at an average 10 billion to 12 billion US dollars every year. But now the figure has fallen to 5.5 billion dollars annually.

However, the retailing of coffee products in coffee-consuming countries increased from 30 billion dollars in 1990 to 80 billion dollars in 2001.

More than 1,000 experts, entrepreneurs and government officialsfrom coffee-producing countries are attending the conference in this northeastern Brazilian city of Salvador.

During the two-day conference, they would discuss lessons from the crisis, policy for the coffee-producing industry in a market economy and the sustainable development of the coffee industry, a conference news release said.

Source: Xinhua