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posted by martyb on Friday January 18 2019, @04:25AM   Printer-friendly
from the Tea-Time? dept.

https://www.the-scientist.com/news-opinion/majority-of-wild-coffee-species-at-risk-of-extinction--study-finds-65329

More than half of the world’s 124 wild coffee plant species meet the criteria for inclusion on the International Union for Conservation of Nature’s Red List of Threatened Species, according to reports published today (January 16) in Science Advances and Global Change Biology. The authors say extinctions among the species would limit plant breeders’ options in developing new types of coffee in the future.

The study, carried out at Britain’s Royal Botanic Gardens, Kew, found that 60 percent of wild coffee species are at risk, a figure that “is extremely high, especially when you compare this to a global estimate of 22% for plants,” says coauthor Eimear Nic Lughadha in a statement. “Some of the coffee species assessed have not been seen in the wild for more than 100 years, and it is possible that some may already be extinct.”

https://www.bbc.com/news/science-environment-46845461

A second study, in Global Change Biology, found that wild Arabica coffee can be classed as threatened under official (IUCN Red List) rankings, when climate change projections are taken into account.

Its natural population is likely to shrink by up to 50% or more by 2088 because of climate change alone, according to the research.

Wild Arabica is used to supply seeds for coffee farming and also as a harvested crop in its own right.

Ethiopia is the home of Arabica coffee, where it grows naturally in upland rainforests.

"Given the importance of Arabica coffee to Ethiopia, and to the world, we need to do our utmost to understand the risks facing its survival in the wild," said Dr Tadesse Woldemariam Gole, of the Environment and Coffee Forest Forum in Addis Ababa.


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  • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Friday January 18 2019, @04:31AM (10 children)

    by Anonymous Coward on Friday January 18 2019, @04:31AM (#788136)

    Quick! Somebody start selling wild coffee beans imported with sustainable trade policies and hand-harvested by the noble, hard-working people of... where ever.

  • (Score: 4, Touché) by The Mighty Buzzard on Friday January 18 2019, @05:08AM (6 children)

    by The Mighty Buzzard (18) Subscriber Badge <themightybuzzard@proton.me> on Friday January 18 2019, @05:08AM (#788149) Homepage Journal

    I think you've got a better shot of mobilizing people who get up every morning so they can go work for their living. They may be short on time by comparison but they don't have to go be ironic at daddy until he gives them money to go away. Plus, quite a lot of them will stab you repeatedly in the face if you threaten the thing that helps make getting up at 5am slightly less miserable. Which is to say they're far more passionate about the subject.

    --
    My rights don't end where your fear begins.
    • (Score: 2) by Some call me Tim on Friday January 18 2019, @05:54AM (5 children)

      by Some call me Tim (5819) on Friday January 18 2019, @05:54AM (#788156)

      They can mobilize all they want but I doubt this will have any effect at all on the coffee I drink. The hipsters can go pound Starbucks grounds up their backsides if it makes them happy.

      --
      Questioning science is how you do science!
      • (Score: 2) by The Mighty Buzzard on Friday January 18 2019, @06:41AM (4 children)

        by The Mighty Buzzard (18) Subscriber Badge <themightybuzzard@proton.me> on Friday January 18 2019, @06:41AM (#788159) Homepage Journal

        It's quite possible it will. Arabica beans make up the largest part of what ends up in the vast majority of cups in the world. Especially in major US brands.

        --
        My rights don't end where your fear begins.
        • (Score: 3, Interesting) by Arik on Friday January 18 2019, @08:00AM (3 children)

          by Arik (4543) on Friday January 18 2019, @08:00AM (#788171) Journal
          Yes, but those aren't wild arabicas. Many of them aren't pure arabica either - they're cultivars whose history as such stretch back to the 15th century or even beyond. The old cultivar lines are all arabica tracing to Ethiopia where it first became a cultivated crop, so in that sense they're all 'arabica' but that doesn't really mean they have any dependency on the wild arabicas that stayed in the mother country.

          The modern cultivars are way ahead of the wild plants in terms of usefulness to make a cup of coffee. Better yields, tastier beans, better resistance to disease and pests. Maybe I'm missing something but this seems like a pretty remote threat to the morning cup of coffee, particularly given that they're talking about *by 2088* not just now.

          Of course, it's potentially valuable to the breeders of domestic coffee to have plenty of wild varieties available to experiment with, and having a bunch of them concentrated in Ethiopia could be quite valuable to Ethiopia. So it makes perfect sense they'd be in the lead in terms of worrying about this.

          It just seems too small and too distant a threat to really mobilize the working joe drinker.
          --
          If laughter is the best medicine, who are the best doctors?
          • (Score: 4, Insightful) by The Mighty Buzzard on Friday January 18 2019, @11:39AM (2 children)

            by The Mighty Buzzard (18) Subscriber Badge <themightybuzzard@proton.me> on Friday January 18 2019, @11:39AM (#788199) Homepage Journal

            There's always danger in highly specializing any crop away from what nature had forced it to be to survive. Be it selective breeding or genetic modification, it's really a very good idea to keep the base organism still around in case something comes along that hurts your modified variety but it shrugs off easily. This is especially true of crops that are more homogeneous than coffee but it should be a consideration that's taken seriously for any crop that's crucial to human survival.

            --
            My rights don't end where your fear begins.
            • (Score: 1) by Arik on Friday January 18 2019, @03:46PM

              by Arik (4543) on Friday January 18 2019, @03:46PM (#788264) Journal
              Absolutely true. As I said, I can see that it's a loss, just not as immediate and important as it's perhaps being made out to be.

              It seems that arabicas are all quite weak against pests and disease. They were nearly wiped out by CLR (which is still a threat) when it first appeared a few centuries ago, and the response was cross breeding with non-arabicas, particularly canephora, to gain those qualities.
              --
              If laughter is the best medicine, who are the best doctors?
            • (Score: 1, Interesting) by Anonymous Coward on Friday January 18 2019, @04:47PM

              by Anonymous Coward on Friday January 18 2019, @04:47PM (#788293)

              Definitely this. Take a look at bananas for an example. If your grandparents had a banana as a kid, it was likely a gros michel. These days commercial bananas are mostly the cavendish variety. The allegedly better tasting gros michel were almost wiped out by a fungus.

              It looks like the cavendish might go the same way, so banana producers are madly looking for another variety that they can clone and produce genetically identical plantations full of.

  • (Score: 1, Touché) by Anonymous Coward on Friday January 18 2019, @06:57AM (1 child)

    by Anonymous Coward on Friday January 18 2019, @06:57AM (#788161)

    you joking but the alternative is a US invasion on ethiopia for saving the cofee and totally not for control of the suez canal and possibly they break up the country like they did with colombia... wait!

    • (Score: 3, Funny) by Gaaark on Friday January 18 2019, @11:45AM

      by Gaaark (41) on Friday January 18 2019, @11:45AM (#788200) Journal

      They gots Weapons of Mass De-sleepiness! Invade!

      --
      --- Please remind me if I haven't been civil to you: I'm channeling MDC. ---Gaaark 2.0 ---
  • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Friday January 18 2019, @08:17PM

    by Anonymous Coward on Friday January 18 2019, @08:17PM (#788395)

    Pre-processed by civets?