ICO BOARD PASSES OVER COFFEE QUOTA ISSUE Executive board members of the International Coffee Organization, ICO, passed over the issue of export quota negotiations at its regular meeting here, delegates said. No move was made to reopen dialogue on export quotas and no further discussion on the issue is likely during the three-day talks, they said. Producer and consumer members of the ICO council failed to agree export quota shares in early March. Neither Brazil, the largest producer, nor the U.S., the largest consumer, are ready to be flexible, delegates said. "The situation is unchanged," consumer spokesman Abraham Van Overbeeke told reporters. "As long as Brazil sticks to its position there will not be quotas -- there is no point in meeting." At the last council meeting, Brazil wanted to maintain its previous quota share of around 30 pct of the market. Consumers and a splinter group of eight producers favoured redistribution of export shares using "objective criteria," which would likely have reduced Brazil's share. Brazilian delegate Lindenberg Sette said that, if quota negotiations were to resume, the 1.0 mln bag shortfall Brazil was willing to give up in early March if the producer proposal was accepted would no longer be on the table. "As we said from the start...No agreement, no one million bags," he told Reuters. Shortfalls of 200,000 bags offered by OAMCAF, the African and Malagasy Coffee Organization, and 20,000 bags offered by Angola, are also no longer valid, delegates said. The closest the board came to discussing quotas was a briefing by the Guatemalan ICO delegate Rene Montes on a recent Latin American producers meeting in Managua, delegates said. There, the producers expressed their political will to negotiate basic quotas, particularly in the face of the damaging drop in coffee prices after the council failed to agree quotas, Montes said. The ICO board also reviewed export statistics and stock verification. They expected talks on stock verification to take up the remainder of today's session, delegates said.