The country’s exports of coconut oil more than doubled in September from a year earlier, reflecting increased output, an industry group said Friday.

Shipments from the world's largest coconut oil exporter climbed to 100,752 tonnes last month from 39,995 tonnes in the same period last year, industry group United Coconut Associations of the Philippines (UCAP) said in a preliminary report.

Copra production has normalized after the sharp drop in 2008 when farmers ''overharvested'' to take advantage of surging world prices during the first half of last year, Yvonne Agustin, UCAP executive director, told Reuters.

Output of copra, the dried coconut meat from which oil is extracted, had been forecast to rise to between 2.516 million tonnes and 2.77 million tonnes this year from 2.386 million in 2008, UCAP and government officials said earlier.

The recent typhoon (local name: Ondoy) which wreaked havoc in the capital Manila and surrounding provinces had spared coconut-growing areas, said Agustin, but added she was unsure whether a looming ''super typhoon'' would hit these areas located in the southern end of the main Luzon island.

Agustin said the sharp increase in exports of the lauric oil – used in food, detergents and biofuels – was also due to the low-comparative base in the previous year, adding that some of the shipments meant for August were included in the September data. ''We were averaging 80,000 tonnes a month in the last three years and the figure has fallen below that,'' said Agustin.

Demand overseas is also picking up as premium of coconut oil to the more popular palm oil has narrowed considerably, she said, to less than $50 a tonne on Thursday from more than $200 around the same time last year.

For the first nine months of the year, coconut oil exports reached 551,369 tonnes, down 14.8 percent from a year ago. That compared to a more than 60 percent fall in January-April.

Manila expects coconut oil exports to slip to 835,000 tonnes this year from 847,626 tonnes in 2008, on softer global demand. (Reuters)