SAVOUR your breakfast coffee while you can. The future of the world’s most
popular coffee bean is under threat. Only an international emergency programme
can save the surviving remnants of the wild arabica coffee plants growing in the
highland rainforests of southwest Ethiopia, an Ethiopian ecologist claims.
“We gave the world coffee. Now we hope the international community will
collaborate with us to save its genetic base,” says Tadesse Gole, currently at
the University of Bonn in Germany. Government plans to protect three forest
fragments have foundered for lack of cash, Gole told the conference.
Some 90 per cent of the coffee we drink is arabica, making it the most
valuable international commodity apart from oil. Most of it is grown on
plantations outside Ethiopia from a handful of cultivated varieties created from
a few individual bushes.
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But these plantations are at risk from disease, such as the coffee rust that
hit Brazil in the 1970s. And when disaster strikes, plant breeders turn for
genetic help to Ethiopia, home of the largest coffee gene bank at Jimma and the
even greater genetic reserves scattered through the forests, where arabica
bushes make up much of the undergrowth.
But these highland forests have lost more than half their trees in the past
30 years, and today they cover less than 2000 square kilometres, says Gole. They
are being exploited for timber, and razed to make way for tea plantations and to
allow for the mass resettlement of people from the northern districts of
Ethiopia, such as Wollo, that were devastated by drought in the 1980s.
“These forest fragments possess enormous genetic variability of arabica
coffee. They are the best available source of germ plasm for the crop’s
improvement and pest control,” Gole says. Despite the seed banks and
plantations, “as yet we know very little about the biology of the wild coffee”,
he adds. Local farmers who cultivate about 100 traditional varieties in their
own gardens may know more about wild coffee than anyone else, he says.
Meanwhile, Charles Adwanda of Kenya’s Coffee Research Foundation in Ruiru,
near Nairobi, is warning that the gene banks for coffee outside Ethiopia—
in Kenya, Brazil, Colombia, Costa Rica and elsewhere—are also in danger.
Because the seeds do not survive in cold stores, coffee genes can only be saved
by planting bushes in fields.
“Civil unrest, illegal clearing for narcotics cultivation, and the sale of
research land to private developers” are wrecking many of these fields, Adwanda
says. This leaves Ethiopia’s threatened forests as the last line of defence
against the genetic devastation of the world’s favourite drink.