The price of orange-juice futures soared to a 16-year high yesterdayafter the U.S. government said Florida's orange crop will be the smallest in 17 years as cold temperatures and lingering hurricane damage hampered fruit growth.

Orange juice for November delivery soared 27.5 cents, or 17 percent, to $1.923 a pound on the New York Board of Trade, the highest closing price since July 1990 and the biggest percentage gain since August 1999. Prices reached $1.93 in intraday trading.

Florida, the world's second-biggest orange producer behind Brazil, will yield 135 million boxes in the 2006-2007 season, down from 147.9 million, the final revised estimate for last season's crop, the U.S. Department of Agriculture said yesterday in a report. The forecast was the first for a harvest season that began this month and ends in June.

Most of Florida's oranges are turned into juice. Smaller orange crops mean higher consumer prices for juice.

"The vast majority of the floor was expecting something closer to 160 million boxes," said Jack Scoville, a vice president at Price Futures Group in Chicago. The report "was bullish."

Before yesterday, prices had climbed 62 percent in the past year as inventories of frozen juice fell after hurricanes damaged trees and a bacterial disease called citrus canker cut production.

"The trees are still trying to recover from back-to-back hurricanes," said Andy Taylor, vice president of finance at Arcadia, Florida-based Peace River Citrus Products Inc. "Some trees are very sparsely fruited. That's the hurricane hangover from the last two years."

The USDA last week added $100 million in funds to compensate growers for tree losses from a now defunct citrus canker eradication program, bringing the total to $636 million. The program was halted in January when the government said hurricanes had spread the bacterial disease, which can cause fruit to drop prematurely, so widely that eradicating canker was no longer scientifically feasible.

The USDA said earlier this year that the eradication program had claimed more than 12 million orange, grapefruit, tangerine and lemon and lime trees at a cost of $875 million since the canker was discovered near Miami in 1995.

A crop of 135 million boxes would be the smallest for Florida since the freeze-affected 1989-1990 season, when growers picked 110.2 million boxes, the USDA said. A box of oranges weighs about 90 pounds.

The crop should produce 1.58 gallons of juice from each box, matching the average yield over the past 10 years, the USDA said. Last season's final yield was 1.63 gallons per box.

The bulk of Florida's oranges are harvested from October to June. The crop set a record of 244 million boxes in the 1997-1998 season.

"I think it caught us a little off guard," said Mike Sparks, executive vice president and CEO of Florida Citrus Mutual, the state's largest growers' group. "I think most people in the citrus industry were thinking closer to 150 million boxes of oranges."

The small crop means growers could see their best returns in a decade or more, said Bob Norberg, deputy executive director of research and operations at the Florida Department of Citrus, but potentially could hurt profit at companies such as PepsiCo Inc.'s Tropicana Products Inc.

With Associated Press reports