The two types of coffee that most of us drink—arabica and robusta—are at grave risk in the age of climate change.
But farmers in one of Africa’s biggest coffee-exporting countries are growing another variety that is more resistant to heat, drought and disease. For years they have been mixing it up in bags of low-priced robusta. This year they are trying to sell it under their own name: liberica excelsa.
“Even if it’s too hot, it works well,” said Golooba John, a farmer near the town of Zirobwe in central Uganda. Over the past few years, as his robusta trees succumbed to pests and diseases, he replaced them with liberica trees. John now has only 50 Robustas and a thousand Libericas.
Catherine Kiwuka, a coffee specialist with the Uganda National Agricultural Research Organization, is part of an experiment to present liberica excelsa to the world. If it works, it could have important lessons for small coffee farmers elsewhere, demonstrating the importance of wild coffee varieties in a warming world.
Volcafé, a coffee trading company, expects to ship up to three tons of liberica excelsa this year to specialty roasters abroad. Around 200 farmers have been growing liberica, selling it to local traders along with their robusta crop and obtaining robusta prices.
Liberica has a stronger aroma and is a higher quality coffee, Kiwuka said; farmers should be getting higher prices.
In 2016, Zirobwe invited Aaron Davis, a scientist from the cafe at the Royal Botanical Gardens in Kew, England. Davis’ research shows that climate change and deforestation are putting more than half of the world’s wild coffee species at risk of extinction.
Kiwuka and Davis teamed up to urge farmers to improve the harvest and drying of their liberica. Instead of mixing them with the robusta beans, they would sell the libericas separately. If they met certain standards, they would get a higher price.
“In a warming world and in an era beset by supply chain disruptions, liberica coffee could re-emerge as an important crop plant,” they wrote in the journal Nature in December.
It is already an important crop in Deogratius Ocheng’s orchards. If he had relied only on robusta, “I would have been in extreme poverty,” he said.
How does liberica excelsa taste? It is heavy on aroma, but lower on caffeine than Robusta. “It’s Beaujolais nouveau,” he said. “It’s very smooth.”
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The New York Times
BBC-NEWS-SRC: http://www.nytsyn.com/subscribed/stories/6797888, IMPORTING DATE: 2023-07-10 21:10:07
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