Coffee is a multibillion dollar global industry that supports the economy of several tropical countries all on its own. Roughly 100 million farmers depend upon this crop for their survival. Unfortunately for them and for the countless millions who savour coffee every morning, the plant is under significant threat from climate change. Now a team is reporting some welcome news by revealing that they have found a wild coffee species that can both put up with higher temperatures and produce beans that taste good.
But can they take the heat?
Image courtesy of JM Hullot
The two coffee species that dominate the world market are Arabica and Robusta. Arabica is, to put it bluntly, screwed. It grows poorly in high temperatures and the only way it can continue being farmed is through a mix of farm engineering with shading and cooling measures being taken to keep crops alive as temperatures soar. Arabica can also be kept on life support by moving farms up mountains but this is expensive and socially challenging since it will require transplanting low elevation communities to places where it will be harder to survive. Robusta, as its name suggests, is a tougher variety of coffee and can put up with warmer temperatures than Arabica. The catch is that is requires a lot of rainfall and is not as tasty.
Given the problems, the search has been on for another coffee variety. There are 120 other known coffee species. Many grow in warmer and drier environments relative to Robusta and Arabica but all were thought to taste terrible. The new work reveals a species that is climate change tolerant, farmable and (most importantly) delicious.
The species, known as C. stenophylla, grows wild in Guinea, Sierra Leone and Ivory Coast. It was tasted by late Victorian explorers and they noted that coffee made from the beans was good but those reports have been ignored for years (we had Arabica so who cared?). Indeed, there has been no published taste description of this coffee since the 1920's due to its rarity in the wild and absence on farms. Worse it is threatened with extinction in the wild as Robusta coffee that has escaped from farms is currently out-competing it.
The researchers argue that, properly managed, this wild coffee can be grown on farms and used to continue generating a coffee supply for the world as temperatures rise. You can read more in The Economist article that I wrote on this here or listen to my podcast with The Intelligence on this topic here.