Issue link: https://read.dmtmag.com/i/658240
30 STiR tea & coffee industry international / Issue 2, 2016 (April/May) World Coffee Production A few countries dominate world coffee production, by 2050 there need to be more. Increasing productivity of existing land helps but will not offset declining yields due to climate change. New land must be brought into production to meet shortfalls. Photo by Tessa Tucker/STiR Tea & Coffee Climate concerns February 2016 shattered records as the warmest month ever compared to averages dat- ing back to when record keeping began in 1880. It follows a record-breaking Decem- ber 2015 and January 2016, an unprecedented three months in a row with temperatures at least 1C warmer than the 20th century average. El Niño is a major driver of the recent uptick in global temperatures, it is currently roasting the tropics, but El Niño alone cannot account for all the extra heat the planet has seen recently. It an October 2015 report titled "Arabica Coffee Faces a Roasting" the Interna- tional Center for Tropical Agriculture (CIAT) cites research indicating that 80% of the land currently used to grow arabica coffee will become unsuitable by 2050. Even the safest areas with cooler temperatures "could suffer a one-third slump in suitability." The findings are based on research published in the journal Plos One. More alarming to the specialty coffee community is the fact that cupping scores over the entire crop fall significantly along with yield. The CIAT scientists, and work by those at World Coffee Research and the CGIAR Research Program on Climate Change, Agriculture and Food Security (CCAFS) expect rising temperatures to also trigger unpredictable rains, bring new threats from pests and lead to outbreaks of plant diseases. There really is no global answer for coping with global warming, according to Aar- on Davis, head of coffee research at the Kew Royal Botanic Gardens in Surry, Eng- land. It can only be addressed locally, taking into consideration unique micro climates and terroir. It starts with best farm practices and layers reforestation, migration upslope, regeneration and new cultivars. Busi- ness as usual in Ethiopia, where Kew has conducted extensive research, puts in jeopardy the livelihood of 15 million coffee farmers. Globally that total rises to hundreds of millions. In his view the only choice is a complicated mix of actions that he calls "building climate resilience." The role of genetics Tim Schilling c.e.o. at World Coffee Re- search is an agronomist, manager, and researcher with strong market orienta- tion and experience in agribusiness and cooperative development. He puts a lot of faith in the resilience of growers. More critical is the resilience of their plants. The existing mix of arabica is danger- ously similar in its DNA. Virtually all of the plants globally are descended from the very few seeds that left Ethiopia and other African countries during the past two centuries. This makes coffee sus- ceptible to blights like the outbreak of Hemileia vastatrix that in 1869 decimated the coffee industry in Sri Lanka killing 90% of its trees — the industry never re- covered. Schilling is "breeding the future" through the selection of super parents that are resistant to heat and disease while maintaining quality and productivity. Researchers at the Texas A&M's Nor- man Borlaug Institute, financed by indus- try donations to WCR are developing a "new generation of climate resilient, rust resistant, high quality Arabica," according to Schilling. In the past few years WCR examined 249 million base pairs (DNA) from 947 strains of arabica to determine 50 winners which resulted in 10 super par- ents that are now being cross-bred with the best Central American arabica. Illy and rival Guiseppe Lavaza are fi- nancing a related effort to map the arabica genome. The research is being conducted by the Universities of Padua and Trieste and by the Istituto di Genomica Appli- cata of Udine, coordinated by Professor Giorgio Graziosi of DNA Analytica Srl, a spin-off of the University of Trieste. A genomic library of 175,000 clones enabled researchers to program comput- erized reconstructions of gene sequences to identify the origins of the plant and pinpoint genes that confer a particular re- sistance to disease or infection, as well as