David Ngibuini is a second-generation coffee farmer in Kenya’s central highlands, an region of cool temperatures and rich volcanic soil that has long been one of the best places to grow coffee on earth. On an afternoon in May, after several months of rain, his 11-acre lot is lush. Six thousand trees – almost all of them varieties of Coffea arabica, the most consumed and tastiest coffee species – sit in neatly planted rows, their waxy, deep green leaves glistening in the sun. Workers sort through a pile of freshly picked cherries — the red fruit that contains the beans that will be fermented, dried and shipped to roasters around the world.
The strength of this year’s harvest hides a deeper, existential struggle. Arabica coffee, which has been cultivated in Kenya since the 19st century, is particularly vulnerable to climate change. One 2022 studyof the Zurich University of Applied Sciences, projects the amount of land most suitable for growing it will drop by more than 50 percent by 2050.
Ngibuini’s farm, Maguta Estate, is already feeling the impact. Rising temperatures stunted the growth of cherries and made trees more vulnerable to disease and pests. Rain, which used to come reliably twice a year, is increasingly erratic, leading to wide swings in volume and quality. In his best year, spanning 2020 and 2021, Ngibuini processed nearly 50,000 pounds of beans, sourced from his farm as well as others in the area. The following year, after a prolonged drought, output was down nearly 80 percent.
“We haven’t even had a major pest attack,” he said. “The drop was just because of the climate.”
Jonathan W. Rosen
As coffee’s uncertainty grows, so does demand: According to some estimates, global consumption is currently 2.3 billion cups per day, could double by mid-century. The projected supply gap has left the industry scrambling for possible solutions, including non-arabica coffee species and caffeine-infused alternatives made from substances such as chickpeas and date seeds.
But for coffee purists, and millions of farming families like Ngibuini’s, the most promising solution may be a newfound push to improve adaptability and yields of arabica itself. This is the idea behind Innovea, a new project led by the non-profit organization World Coffee Research, which aims to complement the breeding of improved arabica varieties. — unique variations of a given species that have been selected for certain characteristics. In an industry that has long neglected to fund research and development, Innovea, a collaboration with government-affiliated research institutions in nine partner countries, including Kenya, is widely regarded as the most comprehensive coffee-growing initiative in decades.
According to Vern Long, CEO of World Coffee Research, or WCR, which is based in the United States and funded by the coffee industry, new varieties are one of the best ways to “improve a crop’s productivity and reduce risk. ” Innovea’s goal, she said, is to develop trees that are optimized for a range of production environments — ultimately giving farmers more climate-resilient options.
Although almost every commodity faces threats from a warming climate, arabica especially picky. Its trees perform best in areas with moderate rainfall and temperatures that stay between 59 and 82 degrees Fahrenheit. This typically means regions of the tropics at least 3,000 feet above sea level; Ngibuini’s farm near Mount Kenya, Africa’s second highest peak, sits at a cool 5,700. As temperatures warm, many expect cultivation to shift to even higher altitudes. However, it has its limits. “The higher you go, the less land there is available,” said Roman Grüter, an environmental scientist who led the study from the Zurich University of Applied Sciences. Farmers who move uphill, he added, are more likely to encounter steep slopes, or protected conservation areas.
Arabica is so fragile in part because its gene pool is surprisingly narrow. The 58 varieties widely cultivated today are all derived from a subset of wild forest coffee native to Ethiopia, which was brought to Yemen by Arab traders in the 15st century and later spread by European colonizers across Asia, Africa and Latin America. Because it is a slow-maturing tree crop, new variety development, which involves breeding over several generations, can take decades. Coffee R&D, like much crop innovation, is largely state-funded – and in the low- and middle-income countries where arabica is grown, governments are often strapped for cash. While Brazil and Colombia, the two largest arabica producers, have a history of strong government support for coffee research, many of their counterparts have long lacked sufficient resources for variety development. A study commissioned by WCR in 2023 estimates that just $115 million is invested in coffee R&D each year, less than one-tenth of one percent of coffee’s $200 billion retail value.
“If you’re a low-income country, and you have to pay for roads and clinics and teachers’ salaries, there’s a strong pull to put income from coffee into those things instead of research,” Long said.
For much of coffee’s history, the importers, roasters and retailers of the rich world didn’t put much money into crop improvement either: As long as they had a reliable supply of beans, they didn’t need to. A wake-up call came in 2012, when shifts in temperature and rainfall linked to climate change caused an outbreak of coffee leaf blight, a debilitating fungus. which would affect Latin America for years. A group of coffee businesses founded WCR that year as a way to facilitate collaborative R&D; the organization is today funded by 177 member companies.
WCR began by conducting a trial of existing varieties and planting 31 of them from around the world in a range of climate zones in 15 countries. It also established a project to develop and test new “F1 hybrids,” varieties created from genetically distant parents that tend to produce higher yields but are also more expensive to grow.
Launched in 2022, Innovea builds on both efforts. To begin with, WCR breeders created 30 new crosses from 16 parent varieties selected based on their performance in previous trials. WCR then sent 5,000 resulting seeds – each of them genetically distinct – to government researchers in Kenya, Rwanda, Uganda, India, Indonesia, Costa Rica, Mexico, Peru and Hawai’i. Planting on experimental sites began this year and will continue until 2025.
After six years, when the new trees are mature and have produced several crops of their own, many will have traits that are undesirable, Long said. However, some will be “high yielding, disease resistant and good tasting” and will be moved to further trials or used to make new crosses that could lead to even better trait combinations. While the breeding is done using traditional methods, it is aided by low-cost genetic sequencing technology, which enables WCR and partner breeders to correlate observed traits with plant DNA and speed up new crosses.
“The idea is to identify the genes we’re looking for and go with those plants instead of others,” says Jane Cheserek, head breeder at Kenya’s government-run Coffee Research Institute, WCR’s Kenyan partner.
Innovea is not the only privately funded coffee breeding effort: At least two major ones industry players, Nestlé and Starbuckshas diversity development programs in house.
What makes Innovea stand out is its scale and its collaborative approach. Although coffee-exporting countries are natural competitors, Long said, partner governments have accepted that it is in their best interest to cooperate on R&D and allow their genetic material to move across borders. WCR expects to have 100 new pre-commercial varieties available for trials by 2030 and will then work with partner governments to release a subset of them to farmers as soon as 2036. Ultimately, these “completed varieties” will be owned by governments, rather than by WKR or its financial backers.
The effort “enhances cooperation to a new level,” said Stuart McCook, a historian at the University of Guelph in Ontario. study coffee and other tropical commodities and which are not involved in Innovea. The program, he added, represents the first coffee breeding project of such global scope since a Portugal-led effort to develop and circulate leaf rust-resistant coffees in the 1960s.
World Coffee Research
While McCook believes that the development of new varieties is essential to the quest to make coffee more resilient, he and many other experts argue that it is not a panacea. As coffee-growing regions warm, he said, innovations in breeding will need to be combined with adaptations in farming practices, such as the introduction of “shade trees” — other types of trees to block the sun — and efforts to restore depleted soils. Coffee producers around the world, particularly at the 12.5 million smallholder farms that produce 60 percent of the world’s supply, will continue to face a global market defined by wild swings in price that sometimes mean crops are sold for below the cost of production – which in turn makes investing in these adaptations even more difficult. One 2018 study by the Kenya Coffee Platform, an industry association, estimates that only 49 percent of Kenya’s coffee smallholders earn a “living wage” from the crop. Kenya’s coffee output today is less than half of its peak in the 1980s, in part because younger generations are turning to more profitable crops, such as macadamia nuts or avocados, or selling land to developers. On the outskirts of Nairobi, Kenya’s capital, many areas once full of arabica have been paved over for housing estates or shopping malls.
Ngibuini (32) is somewhat insulated from the market’s excesses: he sells most of his beans, which have won prizes for quality, at a premium to a specialty buyer. In recent years, he planted shade trees, which also boosted soil nutrients and led to improved cherry quality.
What he can’t do, at least for now, is plant the perfect variety of coffee. While he has several on his farm, all come with anomalies: One Kenyan-developed F1 hybrid, for example, which he selected for its disease resistance, struggled more than other varieties in the recent drought. Ideally, he would plant a variety that resists the coffee berry borer, a beetle that feasts on coffee cherries, and ripens with greater uniformity. The erratic rain, he said, means cherries are ripening less consistently than ever, making harvesting and processing less efficient.
This variety remains hypothetical today. But in the years ahead, if Innovea lives up to its promise, Ngibuini will have more control over the types of coffee trees he grows – so he can better play his part in saving the morning brew for us all.
