Coffee Slumps as Houston Supplies Remain Dry

Coffee futures slumped Wednesday as fears lifted that coffee supplies in Houston ports had been damaged by flooding from Hurricane Harvey.

Arabica coffee for December delivery was down 0.4% to close at $1.282 a pound on the ICE Futures U.S. exchange.

The National Coffee Association said Wednesday that there has been no damage to coffee in warehouses. The Green Coffee Association said in its monthly report that 867,726 bags of coffee were stored in Houston warehouses as of the end of July out of a total of 7,413,312 bags stored in U.S. warehouses overall. Houston is second only to New York in the amount of coffee stored.

"As the storage facilities are located at higher parts of the town losses are not expected at this moment," said Rodrigo Costa, director of trading at Comexim USA.

In other markets, cocoa for December lost 1.8% to end at $1,924 a ton. The front-month contract has been stuck in a trading range between $1,950 and $2,000 a ton in recently weeks. A rebound in the dollar helped the selloff, making cocoa relatively more expensive for countries buying dollar-denominated cocoa in other currencies. The WSJ Dollar Index was up 0.5% recently against a basket of currencies.

Raw sugar for October rose 0.7% to end at 13.91 cents a pound, frozen concentrated orange juice for November was off 0.8% at $1.3005 a pound, and December cotton rose 1.2% to 70.85 cents a pound.

Write to Julie Wernau at julie.wernau@wsj.com

(END) Dow Jones Newswires

August 30, 2017 16:17 ET (20:17 GMT)