With 2 billion cups of coffee drunk every day, 25 million households dependent on coffee cultivation for their livelihoods, and coffee consumption up 43 percent over the past few years, researchers warn that the world's hottest coffee tree, Arabica, is threatened with its survival.
There are more than 120 varieties of coffee trees, but the only ones we drink most often are Arabica and Robusta.
Robusta accounts for about 30% of global coffee bean production and is mainly used for instant coffee, which, as the name suggests, is a strong tree species. But for good coffee, Arabica is still the first choice.
Arabica coffee is on the verge of extinction
Arabica is an accidental combination of two coffee tree species.
"It's a love story," says Dr. Timothy Schilling, a world café research institute, "more than 10,000 years ago, Arabica's parents met like a one-night stand and created Arabica," and since then it has had a smooth taste and rich layers of delicious coffee.
But there are fewer and fewer delicious coffees, because Arabica's physique is as weak as Lin Daiyu. Congenital deficiencies that make it easy to get sick, as well as greater sensitivity to temperature changes and rainfall, affect yields.
According to a research team at Royal Botanic Gardens (Kew), the UK's largest botanical garden, Arabica faces daunting challenges in Ethiopia, its birthplace.
They experimented with computer models to find out what the effects of climate change would be on Arabica, predicting that Ethiopia's wild Arabica would decline by 85 percent by 2080, or worse, 99.7 percent would disappear to the surface, nearly extinct.
"If we don't act now, the end of the century will be the end of Ethiopia's wild Arabica beans," said Dr. Aaron Davis, who led the research on Hill Coffee.
The report has attracted worldwide attention and spurred action on the coffee industry, with the Hill Research team and their partners in Ethiopia visiting the local coffee-producing regions to compare their projections with current conditions. The team is currently working with the Ethiopian government to find ways to protect the coffee industry, moving to colder highlands may be one solution. Some areas are not suitable for growing coffee at this stage and may become suitable in the future.
The coffee estate hit harder
In addition to wild coffee, the study of Hill Garden has had a greater impact on commercially grown coffee estates. Because the environment is key, genetics is another factor.
Wild species have greater genetic diversity, commercially grown coffee beans lack genetic diversity, the disastrous consequence is susceptibility to disease and infection, and the greatest risk of growing coffee comes from leaf rust, a fungus that almost destroyed Sri Lanka's coffee trees at the end of the nineteenth century.
Coffee is an "orphan crop" and "unlike other crop varieties, coffee has been poorly studied," said Dr. Timothy Schilling, the world's coffee research institute.
Recognition of Arabica is also relatively recent, and it was only at the end of the 19th century that scientists confirmed that it was a species of Ethiopian and not from Arabia, which has a similar name.
Because it grows in tropical countries that lack research resources, there are only about 40 breeding institutions, which is pitifully small compared to the thousands of other crops, such as maize, rice and wheat. Lack of breeding makes diversity insufficient.
Scholars were ambitious to improve Arabica with better breeding techniques in order to save good coffee from extinction, but the revolution had not yet succeeded, and comrades still had to work hard.
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Source: Coffee Culture