David Ngibuini is a second-generation coffee farmer who lives in the central highlands of Kenya. Blessed with cool temperatures and rich volcanic soil, the region has long been considered one of the best places on Earth to grow coffee. On a May afternoon, after months of rain, his 11 acres are lush and green. Neatly planted, their 6,000 trees—mostly varieties of Coffea arabica, the most widely consumed and best-tasting coffee species—glow in the sunshine, their waxy, deep-green leaves. Workers sort through piles of freshly picked cherries, their red fruit containing the beans that will be fermented, dried and shipped to roasters around the world.
The strength of this year’s harvest masks a deeper, existential dilemma. Arabica coffee, which has been grown in Kenya since the 19th century,Number The 21st century is particularly vulnerable to the effects of climate change. 2022 SurveyResearchers at the Zurich University of Applied Sciences predict that by 2050, the area of land suitable for growing tomatoes will decrease by more than 50 percent.
Ngibuini’s farm, Maguta Estate, is already feeling the effects. Rising temperatures are stunting cherry growth, making the trees more vulnerable to disease and pests. Rains that were once reliably falling twice a year are becoming increasingly erratic, causing wide fluctuations in quantity and quality. In his best year, 2020-2021, Ngibuini processed about 50,000 pounds of beans from his own farm and others in the surrounding area. The following year was hit by an extended drought, and production fell by nearly 80%.
“There haven’t been any major pest infestations,” he said. “The decline is simply due to the climate.”
Jonathan W. Rosen
As coffee becomes more volatile, so does demand. By some estimates, global coffee consumption is now at 1.2 billion US dollars. 2.3 billion cups per day, Could double by the middle of the 21st centuryThe expected supply shortage has the industry searching for solutions. Non-Arabica coffee There are also caffeinated alternatives made from substances such as chickpeas and date seeds.
But for coffee purists and millions of farmers like Ngibuini, the most promising solution may be new efforts to improve the adaptability and yield of the arabica itself. That’s the idea behind Innovair, a new project led by the nonprofit World Coffee Research, which aims to accelerate the breeding of improved arabica varieties. — A unique variant of a particular species, selected for specific traits. In an industry that has long underfunded research and development, Innovea, conducted in collaboration with government research institutes in nine partner countries, including Kenya, is widely considered to be the largest coffee breeding effort in decades.
Vern Long, CEO of the US-based, coffee industry-funded World Coffee Research (WCR), says new varieties are one of the best ways to “increase crop productivity and reduce risk.” Innovair’s goal, Long says, is to develop trees optimized for different growing environments, ultimately giving farmers more climate-resilient options.
Almost every commodity is under threat from global warming, but Arabica As temperatures rise, many expect cropland to move further upland. But there are limits to this: “The higher you go, the less land is available,” says Roman Grüter, an environmental scientist at Zurich University of Applied Sciences who led the study, adding that farmers who move upland are more likely to encounter slopes that are too steep or protected nature reserves.
Arabica is so vulnerable in part because its gene pool is incredibly narrow: all 58 varieties widely grown today are descended from a subset of wild forest coffee native to Ethiopia that was brought to Yemen by Arab traders in the 15th century.Number Coffee originated in the 1st century and was subsequently spread throughout Asia, Africa and Latin America by European colonialists. Because coffee is a slow-growing tree crop, the development of new varieties can take decades, involving several generations of breeding. Coffee research and development, like innovation in many other crops, is primarily state-funded, and in low- and middle-income countries where arabica is grown, governments are often underfunded. While Brazil and Colombia, the two largest producers of arabica, have a history of strong government support for coffee research, many other countries have long lacked sufficient resources for varietal development. Research commissioned by WCR It is estimated that in 2023, only $115 million will be invested annually in coffee research and development, less than 0.1% of the $200 billion retail value of coffee.
The best coffee for the planet may not be coffee at all
“If you’re a low-income country, you have to pay for roads, clinics and teachers, so there’s a strong desire to put coffee revenues into those things rather than into research,” Long said.
For most of coffee’s history, importers, roasters and retailers in developed countries didn’t put much money into improving crops. As long as there was a steady supply of beans, there was no need to. Alarm bells sounded in 2012 when changes in temperature and rainfall linked to climate change led to outbreaks of a debilitating fungus called coffee leaf rust. Influencing Latin America A group of coffee industry members founded WCR that year as a way to foster collaborative research and development, and today the organization is funded by its 177 member companies.
WCR began by testing existing varieties, growing 31 varieties in different climates across 15 countries around the world, and launched a project to develop and test new “F1 hybrids” that are bred from genetically distant parents. F1 hybrids tend to be higher yielding but also more expensive to grow.
Innovair, launched in 2022, builds on both efforts. First, WCR breeders created 30 new crosses from 16 parent varieties chosen based on their performance in previous trials. WCR then shipped 5,000 seeds, each genetically distinct, to government researchers in Kenya, Rwanda, Uganda, India, Indonesia, Costa Rica, Mexico, Peru and Hawaii. Plantings in experimental fields began this year and are scheduled to continue through 2025.
After six years, when the new trees are growing and producing their own crops, Long says, many will have undesirable traits. But some will be “high-yielding, disease-resistant, or taste better” and will be moved on to further trials or used in new crosses that might produce even better combinations of traits. The crosses are done traditionally, but with the help of low-cost gene-sequencing technology, which allows WCR and its partner breeders to correlate observed traits with the plants’ DNA and make new crosses more quickly.
“The idea is to identify the genes we’re looking for and then work on those plants instead of other plants,” said Jane Cheserek, lead breeder at WCR’s Kenya partner, the Kenyan government-run Coffee Research Institute.
Innovair is not the only example of a privately funded coffee breeding project. Industry insiders, Nestle and StarbucksWe have an in-house breeding program.
What sets Innovair apart is its scale and collaborative approach. While coffee-exporting countries are natural competitors, partner governments recognize that it is in their interests to collaborate on R&D and move genetic material across borders, Long said. WCR hopes to offer 100 new pre-commercial varieties for testing by 2030, and, working with partner governments, to have some available to farmers as early as 2036. Ultimately, these “finished varieties” will be owned by the governments, not WCR or its funders.
The effort “takes collaboration to a new level,” says Stuart McCook, a historian at the University of Guelph in Ontario. Study Coffee and other tropical crops, and is not involved with Innovair, he added, adding that the program is the first global coffee breeding project since a Portuguese initiative in the 1960s aimed to develop and market coffee resistant to leaf rust.
World Coffee Research
McCook believes the development of new varieties is essential to making coffee more durable, but he and many other experts argue it’s not a panacea. As coffee-growing regions warm, he says, breeding innovations will need to be combined with adaptations to agricultural practices, such as the introduction of “shade trees” (different types of trees that block sunlight) and efforts to revitalize depleted soils. Coffee producers around the world, especially the 12.5 million smallholders who produce 60% of the world’s supply, will continue to face a global market characterized by high price fluctuations. This makes it even more difficult to invest in such adaptations, as they may have to sell their harvests below the cost of production. 2018 Survey Industry group Kenya Coffee Platform estimates that only 49 percent of Kenya’s smallholder coffee farmers earn a “living wage” from their coffee. Today, Kenya produces 100% of its coffee. Less than half of peak time Arabica cultivation declined in the 1980s, partly as younger generations turned to more profitable crops like macadamia nuts and avocados, and partly as they sold land to developers. Many areas outside Nairobi, Kenya’s capital, that were once teeming with arabica coffee, have been paved over to housing estates and shopping malls.
Ngibuini, 32, is somewhat insulated from market glut: He sells most of his prized beans to specialist buyers at premium prices. In recent years, he has planted shade trees that also boost nutrients in the soil, improving the quality of his cherries.
At least for now, he can’t plant the perfect coffee variety. He has several varieties on his farm, but they all have their flaws. For example, an F1 hybrid developed in Kenya that he chose for its disease resistance struggled more than others during the recent drought. Ideally, he’d plant a variety that could resist the coffee berry borer, a beetle that eats coffee cherries, and ripen more evenly. He says that erratic rains mean the cherries ripen more erratically than ever, making harvesting and processing less efficient.
The variety is still hypothetical for now, but if Innovair delivers on its promises over the next few years, Ngibuini will have more control over the types of coffee plants he grows, and be better able to play his part in protecting our morning coffee for all of us.
