Orange juice futures soared to a 16-year high after the American government said Florida’s orange crop will be the smallest in 17 years as cold temperatures and lingering hurricane damage hampered fruit growth.

Florida, the world’s second-biggest orange grower behind Brazil, will produce 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 today in a report.The forecast was the first for a harvest season that began this month and ends in June.

“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.”

Orange juice for November delivery soared 27.5 cents, or 17%, 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.

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

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

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.

Most of Florida’s oranges are turned into juice. Smaller orange crops mean higher prices for juice, potentially hurting profit at companies such as PepsiCo Inc.’s Tropicana Products Inc.

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.