The New York Board of Trade's active December arabica contract lost 0.30 cent to end at $1.0315 a lb, after trading from $1.0255 to $1.0420.
March arabica likewise dipped 0.30 cents to settle at $1.0625 a lb., while longer-dated contracts lost 0.25 to 0.80 cents. NYBOT coffee futures trading volume reached an estimated 8,275 lots, well below on Friday's official tally of 16,353 contracts.
Roasters and producers held back, while speculators were on guard as Hurricane Wilma pounded Miami, the third largest coffee port in the United States.
"It was very quiet today," said Rodrigo Costa, vice president of institutional sales at Fimat USA. "Some people came in a little bearish today, but I still think the hurricane is preventing people from getting shorter here," he said.
Hurricane Wilma lashed at southern Florida on Monday, just two months after Hurricane Katrina rocked New Orleans and caused damage to some of the coffee warehouses.
"There might be some infrastructure problems moving coffee in and out," said one coffee importer based in South Carolina. "But we have to wait for when the storm stops to see if the roads are opened," he said.
Analysts said coffee beans stored in Miami appeared to be better positioned than those warehoused in New Orleans because the Florida City was not as vulnerable to flooding as the Crescent City in nearby Louisiana.
"Certainly, the market reaction is saying there is nothing wrong in Miami," she said. By the end of September, Miami warehouses held 786,597 60-kg bags of unfrosted coffee or about 14 percent of the total supply of 5,662,953 bags of green beans in the United States, according to data from Green Coffee Association Inc.
NYBOT-certified stocks in Miami totalled 494,822 bags on October 20.