Protecting the future of coffee with World Coffee Research
The future of our brews, and the livelihoods of those who produce it, face increasing threats from climate change, diseases and low yields. If we want the industry and the people that work in it to prosper, we need to look closely at how tea and coffee is produced and find farming techniques, and plants, that will survive and thrive in years to come.
Based on my field observations in the different regions of the country, coffee farmers are highly constrained with unpredictable prolonged dry seasons and shorter rainy seasons requiring expensive measures such as mulching and irrigation, making coffee farming a capital intensive venture. This is accompanied with perseverance of diseases such as coffee leaf rust that occur in farmer fields mainly in the dry season leading to great losses/reduction in coffee yields.
A research-based approach
Tea and coffee farmers around the world are already seeing glimpses of what the worst effects of climate change are going to bring. Droughts and flooding, declining yields of quality produce and devastating diseases mean that farmers often struggle to make a decent living from their crop. As events like these increase with global warming, more and more producers will find that growing tea or coffee isn’t a viable source of income.
To address these changes, we urgently need to work with our suppliers on new and innovative approaches to farming. Which is why we’re proud to be championing the work of World Coffee Research (WCR), a collaborative organisation which enables the global coffee industry to invest in agricultural innovation to empower producers.
WCR combine cutting edge research and development with a focus on farmers to try and get the best new agronomy approaches and varieties into farmers’ hands as soon as possible. We’re proud to support WCR’s portfolio of collaborative research.
Over the past two years, we’ve supported the development of an interactive web tool with World Coffee Research and the International Centre for Tropical Agriculture to help coffee farmers select the best-performing varieties. The initiative combines climate modelling and global variety performance data so that coffee farmers can choose the best-performing varieties for their location, based on future climate predictions.