LONDON: Raw sugar futures on ICE were slightly lower on Wednesday with overhead producer selling keeping a lid on the market while arabica coffee edged up but remained within striking distance of last week's 13-year low.
SUGAR
* May raw sugar fell 0.04 cent, or 0.3 percent, to 12.74 cents per lb by 1113 GMT.
* Dealers said strength in crude oil prices continued to underpin the market but the upside remained capped by producer selling.
* "Highly visible producer pricing (supposedly mainly Thais) is continuing to put a cap on May at 12.80 and scale up from there," consultants Agrilion said in a market note.
* Dealers noted data on sugar production in Centre-South Brazil confirmed a significant decline during the 2018/19 season (April/March) although a slight recovery is generally expected in the current season which began last week.
* May white sugar was down $1.70, or 0.5 percent, at $326.50 a tonne.
* Dealers noted May was trading at a discount of about $11 to August <LSU-1=R> ahead of the former month's expiry on April 15 indicating there appeared to be little appetite to take delivery. There is talk that Indian sugar may be tendered.
COFFEE
* May arabica coffee was up 0.30 cent, or 0.3 percent, at 93.95 cents per lb.
* Dealers said the market was currently consolidating just above a 13-year low of 91.25 cents set last week.
* May robusta coffee was up $6, or 0.4 percent, at $1,426 a tonne.
* Vietnam, the world's top robusta producer, exported 172,080 tonnes, or 2.87 million 60-kg bags, of coffee in March, up 49.5 percent from February, customs data released on Wednesday showed.
COCOA
* May New York cocoa was down $8, or 0.3 percent, at $2,438 a tonne in a modest pullback from the prior session's nine-month high of $2,451.
* Dealers said the market was technically overbought after the recent rally so the slight setback was not expected.
* Cocoa arrivals at ports in top grower Ivory Coast reached 1.660 million tonnes between Oct. 1 and March 31, CCC data showed on Wednesday, up about 10 percent from 1.509 million tonnes in the same period last season.
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