There are 35 000 genes in the humble coffee bean. So say scientists in Brazil, after studying 200 000 strands of DNA and drinking an unspecified amount of the brew itself.
This genetic research will lead to better-tasting coffee, according to Roberto Rodrigues, Brazil’s Agriculture Minister. This is significant news for Africa’s embattled coffee producers, who have been badly hurt by a global drop in prices.
It may also lead to crops that can fight off disease and frost more easily. This is important for all the economies reliant on coffee, but especially for Brazil, whose caffeinated crop accounts for a third of the world’s coffee production. (Coffee research in Brazil recently received another kick-start when scientists discovered a naturally decaffeinated bean from an Ethiopian plant, suggesting that one day soon we can drink some decent decaf.)
“We are going to create a super-coffee that everyone can benefit from eventually,” a jubilant Rodrigues told the BBC in Brasilia.
Rodrigues ruled out a genetically modified cup of coffee. Instead, breeding experiments will be used to transfer pollen between plants whose genetic make-up is already known.
Pollen is a big issue for coffee farmers — no pollination, no coffee bean — and the latest research should make environmentalists happy, too.
A new study shows that the closer coffee bushes are planted to patches of forest, the more beans they produce — and of better quality — because of greater pollination by wild bees.
Conserving tropical forests could thus increase profits for coffee farmers in developing countries, according to research published this month in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.
The researchers, from the WWF and two American universities, studied a Costa Rican coffee farm bordered by patches of intact forest. They selected five coffee plants at increasing distances from the forest. On each plant, two branches were pollinated by hand and two were left to be pollinated naturally.
By comparing yields from each branch, the scientists were able to measure the contribution of wild insect pollinators and how this varied with distance from the forest.
They found that coffee plants within 1km of the forest had yields that were 20% higher than plants further away. The plants close to the forest also had 27% fewer peabodies, or misshapen seeds. The scientists’ explanation is that the forest provides nesting sites for bees, which pollinate the coffee plants while foraging for nectar.
According to the researchers’ calculations, the extra pollination that bees provide increased the farm’s income by about $60 000 in the 2002/03 coffee season. This corresponds to 7% of the farm’s total income for that year.
The figure is similar to the total that could be earned in a year if the same area of forest were used as pasture for beef cattle or to grow sugar cane. If other ecological services, such as carbon storage and water purification, were included, the estimated value of conserving forest patches would increase.
“Policies that allow land owners to capture the value of pollination and other services could provide powerful incentives for forest conservation in some of the most biodiverse and threatened regions on Earth,” concludes the study.
The researchers also point out that the income provided by insect pollination is nearly 10 times what farmers would be paid to maintain the same area of forest under Costa Rica’s Environmental Service Payments, which provides financial incentives for conservation.
Taylor Ricketts of the WWF, who led the study, believes the research findings are potentially applicable in most places where coffee is grown, such as West Africa.
“The other coffee species, Coffea robusta, has a very different pollination ecology,” said Ricketts. “But studies on both species on several continents have consistently shown that bee activity declines with distance from native habitats.”
“I would also like to see whether a diverse, natural shade canopy can provide native pollinators right in the farms themselves,” he added. “This would help farmers be in more direct control of the pollination services on their farms.”
However, not all the news is good on the coffee front. Researchers from the Wildlife Conservation Society in Indonesia have warned that the global coffee crisis is bad for biodiversity as well as many developing-world economies. Coffee production is currently at an all-time high and prices have plummeted.
As a result, the displacement of coffee plantations in countries such as Vietnam and Indonesia has had serious repercussions for human livelihoods and biodiversity conservation.
Timothy O’Brien and Margaret Kinnaird, writing in the journal Science, have argued that new policies focusing on biodiversity-friendly coffees that provide fair prices to growers are critically needed.
They call on the United States to assist in developing solutions to the coffee crisis and warn that if we do not act soon, our next cup of java may have the bitter taste of extinction. — SciDev.Net