Can Varieties Protect the Future of Coffee?

World Coffee Research (WCR), a nonprofit, industry-driven organization, is helping to ensure the future of coffee by coordinating variety development research globally. The organization is focused on growing the number of coffee varieties available to help support farmer profitability, decrease vulnerability to pests and diseases and improve coffee’s climate resilience.“If you want to have coffee in 20 years we need variety research,” explains Hanna Neuschwander, Strategy & Communications Director at WCR.

WCR focuses on conducting and facilitating research into coffee varieties. They also focus on improving systems to distribute high-quality coffee seeds and seedlings and information to ensure coffee producers have the knowledge they need to make informed decisions about varieties. 

The Opportunity Facing Coffee

WCR is dedicated to helping smallholder farmers flourish by providing improved varieties that address challenges like climate change, damage from pests and diseases and low productivity/income.

Existing varieties are no match for the climate crisis, which brings more extreme weather, higher incidence of diseases and pests like Coffee Leaf Rust (CLR), and declining productivity. In some cases, like with CLR, diseases are evolving to overcome plant resistance. Thus, the coffee sector needs to continuously develop new and better varieties to ensure farmers can thrive.

Some trees exhibit low productivity even in ‘normal’ conditions. They might require a high level of inputs to flourish and thus cost farmers time and money. Furthermore, these more temperamental varieties may not fruit or could even die in the face of prolonged drought or extreme heat or cold. Breeding programs are currently working to create varieties that are hardier and more productive and require fewer inputs or investments to help farmers achieve reliable and sustainable incomes.

The Benefits of Variety Research

Developing new varieties can solve a lot of social, economic, and environmental problems, Neuschwander explains, “If you have a plant that is genetically resistant to a specific disease and pest, you may avoid spraying pesticides.” That protects the environment and increases farmer profitability, which can, in turn, improve the quality of life for the farmer’s whole family and even the larger community.

Additionally, the primary driver of deforestation in agricultural regions is the conversion of land to farmland. “If you can grow the same amount of coffee on less land or with fewer inputs, you can increase yields and [reduce] the biggest driver of greenhouse gas emissions: deforestation and land-use conversion,” she says. “Through varieties, you can tackle some really big issues in a small package.”

Roadblocks to Cooperation

While many recognize the importance of variety research, collaboration between countries is not always simple. “It’s not totally obvious sometimes to roasters and buyers that, for countries, coffee is competitive,” Neuschwander explains, “Why doesn’t a country share their plants with everyone? Each country is doing research to support their farmers, and they can be hesitant to share their varieties with farmers in other countries. For that reason, it can be difficult to facilitate cooperation on variety development.

Logistical problems are also common as it can be difficult to move plant specimens across borders. Most countries have strict border control measures that prevent transporting most plant matter across country lines to keep pests and diseases out.

Innovation Across the Globe

WCR has facilitated international cooperation on coffee variety research since its founding in 2012. Recently, the organization launched one of its biggest projects that is focused on variety research across borders that will eventually reach countless coffee farmers.

Innovea, WCR’s global breeding program, brings together collaborating countries to accelerate the pace of genetic improvement for Arabica coffee. The Innovea network’s unique collaborative design provides tremendous value to countries unable to tackle the challenges of climate change on their own. The globally coordinated approach has brought together a wide diversity of genetic material to make it possible to evaluate of genetic lines across many different environments.

“We took high-performing plant material from different parts of the world and brought it together to cross the materials that haven’t been combined before,” said Neuschwander, “We generated new genetic diversity through cross-pollination and are sending those seeds out to our 9 partner countries to evaluate their performance for the next 6 years.” The highest performers may be selected for commercial release by participating countries and will be recombined through further cross-breeding to create even better trees over time.

Creating new generations of varieties with genetic diversity is a long and investment-heavy process. “There’s no silver bullet,” Neuschwander explains. Whatever you’re trying to accomplish in a coffee plan, “you need to keep working at it.” Already, the first wave of Coffee Leaf Rust (CLR)-resistant varieties, first released in the 1980s, is losing their resistance. That means we need new varieties to fill that gap. However, “much of the coffee world has been operating without an innovation pipeline to offer continuous improvement,” she says. “Think about technology in almost any other context — such as iPhones — and what would happen if we went without updates for 20 years. In coffee, we have historically accepted this very unsustainable reality as normal. Until now.”

Distributing New Varieties

Once you have new varieties, there’s another hurdle: getting them out to farmers, Neuschwander says. “It doesn’t matter if you have the world’s best variety if there’s nowhere for farmers to get it.” Almost everywhere, there’s a lack of strong systems to support long-term breeding research and high-quality seed and plant distribution. “Some countries don’t have a legal framework for introducing new varieties…they can’t release stuff even if they have it,” she says.

A global challenge to increasing farmer access to high-quality plants is that there isn’t always strong quality assurance in nurseries. “We do a lot of genetic testing in seed lots and nurseries, and a common problem is that often the plants being sold are not genetically true-to-type,” Neuschwander says. “It’s not a case of fraud, it’s just that basic systems for quality assurance are not in place. Until recently, there weren’t even tools to do genetic testing to check the identity of a variety… It’s something that farmers should be able to take for granted, but it’s not.”

Another issue is that farmers are understandably wary of the investment required for new varieties. “There’s so much risk involved in farming that a farmer typically is not just going to adopt something new because someone says it’s better,” Neuschwander says. Oftentimes, farmers want to see the variety growing on a demonstration plot where they can view the benefits without having to invest time and money into a new variety that might not work for them. But, the challenge of this is that demonstration plots require investments in time, money, and people to run them, partly because you have to wait 3 years for the tree to start fruiting.

Quality: The Elephant in the Room

Farmers aren’t the only ones who sometimes express skepticism about new varieties. “Roasters, sometimes with good reason, have questioned the cup quality of some newer varieties,” says Neuschwander. 

But Neuschwander points out that many of the first-generation disease-resistant varieties like Costa Rica 95 didn’t always live up to buyers’ quality expectations for a reason: they weren’t designed to taste great. At the time some of the early rust-resistant varieties were bred in the 1970s, the industry wasn’t all that focused on cup quality, so that’s not something these were selected for. Now that the demand for higher-scoring, disease-resistant coffee is there, breeders can start selecting for cup quality and disease resistance simultaneously. As an example, some newer varieties have placed very high in Cup of Excellence (COE) competitions, scoring over 90 points.

Many modern varieties have higher cup quality than their predecessors, but the flavors aren’t necessarily the same. A decade ago, WCR helped lead trials comparing the cup quality of Castillo, a newer rust-resistant variety from Colombia, to Caturra, which has long been prized for its solid cup quality. Some specialty buyers didn’t like Castillo going into the trial, but in blind cuppings, the varieties both scored 86. In short, the varieties were both good, but they tasted different. “As an industry, we are getting much more sophisticated about defining what quality means, and how it differs for different market segments and tastes,” says Neuschwander.

Now, WCR’s Innovea Network and other breeding programs are focusing on breeding for higher yields, disease resistance and higher cup scores.

Sucafina is a proud member and partner of WCR. We work with our clients to invest in WCR’s breeding research and what it represents for the future of the coffee industry. In Uganda, UGACOF (Sucafina in Uganda) is working with WCR to establish nurseries to distribute high-performing and coffee wilt-disease-resistant Robusta seedlings to farmers. In Indonesia, Sucafina in Indonesia is working with WCR to trial Komasti, a new coffee variety in West Java. The hope is that this variety will offer an alternative to the varieties currently grown in Java that are struggling to maintain productivity during extreme weather conditions. Roasters in Europe and North America can contribute to WCR’s invaluable research through the Checkoff program. Interested in getting involved? Speak with your trader about how you can add contributions through your coffee purchases to help build the future of coffee together with Sucafina and WCR.

Roasters in Australia who are interested in contributing to WCR's Checkoff program can express interest to their traders.