Typhoon halts Vietnam coffee drying, Philippine toll up

By Ho Binh Minh

HANOI, Nov 2 (Reuters) - Typhoon Mirinae brought strong wind to Vietnam's central coast and heavy rain to the nearby coffee region on Monday, disrupting early harvesting, after killing 16 people and destroying thousands of houses in the Philippines.

The typhoon uprooted trees as it made landfall on the coastal provinces of Binh Dinh and Phu Yen, state-run Vietnam Television reported. The government said nearly 8,000 people had been evacuated in the central region before the typhoon arrived.

Rain fell in Daklak and Lam Dong on Monday morning, Vietnam's largest coffee-growing provinces, disrupting farmers' drying of beans, residents said.The harvesting peaks from late this month."Strong wind and heavy rain struck us two hours ago," said a resident in Dalat city, the capital of Lam Dong.

A resident in neighbouring Daklak said rain had been falling there since early Monday.

"If it rains like this for days, farmers won't be able to go picking cherries," she said.

Persistent rain would prevent farmers from drying their beans outdoors in the sun, a coffee trader said.

"The fear is that if rain lasts for several days, growers will have to dry beans over their wood-fired ovens, and that will make the beans dark," the trader said.

Dark beans are counted as a defect in exportable beans.The national weather bureau forecast rain in the next 24 hours in the southern part of the Central Highlands coffee belt as the typhoon weakens to a tropical low pressure system and moves west-southwest towards Cambodia.

Vietnam is the world's second-largest coffee producer after Brazil.

PHILIPPINE TOLL RISES
In the Philippines security forces and emergency teams worked to clear roads of fallen trees, boulders and mud on Monday after typhoon Mirinae left the country.

Wide areas south of Manila on the main island of Luzon are still without electricity and most roads were either buried by landslides or submerged by floods, said Lieutenant-Colonel Ernesto Torres, spokesman for the disaster agency.

He said most of the people who died had drowned in flash floods. One old woman died when a tree fell on her house in the central Bicol region. He said authorities were still assessing crop and infrastructure losses.

"Our troops are working round the clock to clear the roads ahead of thousands of Filipinos returning from the provinces to visit dead relatives," Torres said, referring to the marking of the Day of the Dead, which fell on Sunday. (Additional reporting by Manny Mogato; Editing by Sanjeev Miglani)