Here is my article about my visit to Madagascar and discovering new coffee farm in the Land of Enchantment. Enjoy
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On 1st November 2012, the 345 members of the SNV-supported Kabakanya cooperative celebrated their third annual consecutive win at the Rwanda Cup of Excellence awards.
The world’s most esteemed award for top quality coffees, the Cup of Excellence has been held annually since 1999. The competition is now held in nine countries, with Rwanda being the first on the African continent. The Rwanda Cup of Excellence consists of a nationwide competition hosted in a selected district and an award ceremony in Kigali, followed by an auction of the winning lots to buyers from around the world – and finally, celebrations by the winning local cooperatives.
Of the 169 lots of fully washed coffee that were entered into the competition, only 26 gained 2012 Cup of Excellence awards. During the selection process the coffees are tasted at least five times by national and international cuppers.
The coffee lots entered by the Kabakanya cooperative brought in a total US$21,023 at auction.
Veneranda Nzayiturinka, the advisor responsible for the SNV coffee programme in Rwanda, said coffee farmer cooperatives were becoming more aware of the tangible benefits from this competition.
“The extra income from the Cup of Excellence is used to reinvest in the farm or to buy household supplies,” Veneranda said. “It encourages farmers to improve the quality of their product right from the gardens to the final consumers.”
The total value of coffee sold at the 2012 auction was US$312,332. While this was down against 2011 figures due to a slow global market, with the first bid at $US24.40, producers still obtained prices up to five times greater than those generally paid by major processors.
“Participation, and especially winning the awards, builds members loyalty to their cooperatives,” Félicien Gasirabo, the chairman of KABAKANYA Cooperative said. “As a consequence of the Cup of Excellence, the farmers deliver more and better coffee beans to the coffee washing stations.”
SNV consultant Francois Sihimbiro highlighted SNV’s role in strengthening the coffee value chain. “SNV’s inclusive business model gives importance to the farmer-owned coffee washing stations, reinforcing management skills and linking them to financial services and other service providers,” he said.
Underlining the importance of the Cup of Excellence, Alex Kanyankole, Director General of the National Agricultural Export Board explained the national strategy for the coffee value chain. “Our plan for 2012- 2017 aims at increasing production of green coffee from 22,000 metric tonnes to 35,000 metric tonnes, and income from $US 78 million to $US 157 million. Organising a big coffee event like the Cup of Excellence is a way to acknowledge the farmers dedication to quality and to call attention to the national coffee strategy.”
Source: SNV
SNV’s operations in Africa are managed in two regional offices; in Ouagadougou, Burkina Faso covering West and Central Africa, and in Nairobi, Kenya covering East and Southern Africa.
By Emma Bladyka, SCAA Coffee Science Manager
By now you have likely heard of the new scientific study published last week in the online peer-reviewed journal PLOS ONE that has sparked a flurry of doomsday headlines for coffee. The study is a collaborative effort between researchers at Kew Royal Botanic Gardens in London and the Environment and Coffee Forest Forum in Ethiopia. Since its publication on November 7th, it has been covered by the popular media with creative titles such as:
The Last Drop?; Climate Change Could Kill Off Coffee; Brew Hoo! Coffee Could Disappear by 2080, Researchers Say; Climate Change taking a toll on coffee;Try not to Panic, but Climate Change is Killing coffee; How Coffee Could become Has-Beans; Coffee Beans at Risk of Extinction; Coffee Beans Burn toward Extinction; You get the idea…
These stories cover the basic idea that coffee may be threatened by climate change, but they are also a bit confusing. What are the actual results of the study? How will the extinction of wild C. arabica affect the supply of quality coffee? How serious is the peril to our morning cup?
It is extremely important to remember that the result from one scientific paper, no matter how perfect the methodology and valid the results, does not equal a finite, absolute answer to a problem or a complete prediction of the future. It is dangerous for the popular press to sensationalize any individual scientific study as it is likely that study does not encompass the body of work on a subject. Also, some of the above headlines can lead to misperceptions about the results of the study. Scientific knowledge of any topic is an evolving and continually changing process, where small pieces of information are gathered over time and are used to build a body of work that helps us to understand a problem or phenomenon.
That being said, this article is open-access, which means that you can go to the journal web site and read or download the article for free. I encourage everyone who is interested in this topic (or the topic of specialty coffee) to do so. Currently, the article has been viewed more than 9,000 times, but only downloaded 7.41% of the time (per metrics on the PLOS ONE web site). Be empowered by knowledge and read the paper for yourself. Certainly, there may be many elements of the paper (for example, the methods section) that are not your cup of tea or as digestable as a mainstream media article. Try starting with the abstract and introduction, then moving to the results, and finally the discussion. This is an important paper highlighting one of the most critical problems facing the specialty coffee industry: loss of C. arabica genetic diversity.
For those of you who would like a bit of background on this topic, the scientific community, and now pretty much the entire world, have acknowledged that anthropogenic climate change is real and is already impacting living organisms. Since plants are rooted, they are stationary and unfortunately this gives them a slight disadvantage when climate change begins to make their living situations less than ideal. In the coffee industry we know that since coffee is a plant it will likely have some physiological or even species-level responses to changes in temperature, rainfall intensity and distribution, and other climate-related environmental changes. In specialty coffee, we have been talking about this for some time; how perhaps ideal coffee growing regions will get warmer, and how that may change the geographic distribution of those regions.
And that is exactly what this paper is showing. Their computer models mapped the range of wild C. arabica and compared that with future climate change scenarios predicted by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (the IPCC) for the next century revealed that within the next 70 years wild C. arabicahas a high probability of going extinct. What does that mean for genetic diversity? We don’t know for sure how much unique and diverse genetic material currently exists within wild C. arabica in Ethiopia and surrounding regions. One Ethiopian PhD dissertation suggests that the genetic diversity in cultivated C. arabica only accounts for 10% of the diversity of wild Ethiopian populations (as reported on the WCR web site). However, it is likely even less than that, leaving us with much to learn from the wild genotypes. The danger is that we may never know, unless we begin to conserve these wild populations and do a thorough examination of their genetic diversity.
Why is genetic diversity important? Without writing a textbook about it, each organism’s capacity to grow, change, acclimate, and thrive, is dependent on their genetics. You can think of a genome as a sort of tool-box for organisms. A population of organisms of the same species is made up of a group of individuals with slightly different genomes or tools at their disposal. The more diverse the population is the more differences are in the genome. This is important for long-term survival, as different individuals may have different strengths. For example, a few wild coffee plants may be very frost-tolerant due to a slight difference in their genetic codes caused by evolving in a colder than normal climate. This sub-set of the population may be the only ones to survive if exposed to a severe winter storm. Another group of wild coffee plants may produce more of a certain hormone and by chance ward off the coffee berry borer in a large outbreak. These are only two examples of what could be endless possibilities in the wild C. arabica population. The take home message here is that the more diversity that exists within a population, the more likely that population will survive exterior challenges such as climate change. Why would we (the specialty coffee industry) like to have as much C. arabica genetic diversity as possible? Because in future breeding programs this biodiversity may be used to create amazing tasting, heat tolerant, high yielding, pest and fungus resistant cultivars. But in order to access the tools we need to preserve the tool box.
What should we really know about this topic? Here are the bullets:
1) The area of the world where coffee is indigenous has a rapidly changing climate and will change dramatically in the future due to anthropogenic climate change.
2) Wild coffee still exists in this region that has not been conserved, catalogued, or researched for its genetic diversity and unique phenotypes, and is vulnerable to changes in climate.
3) This study reported that the region may be inhospitable for wild C. arabica within the next 70 years, leading to the extinction of indigenous populations.
4) Genetic diversity of C. arabica is extremely important to the specialty coffee industry, as it will be necessary to maintain an adequate tool box for breeding new coffees as part of an adaptive strategy for commercialized coffee.
5) The climate changes predicted for this region of the world may also affect cultivated coffee in the future, which may result in a variety of other unforeseen consequences.
6) Coffee is threatened by climate change, but we have time to act to preserve these wild genotypes. Institutions and organizations like World Coffee Research already are making progress on these important issues.
What can be done about this? What are the steps that the industry needs to take in order to preserve these wild C. arabica genotypes? The first critical step is to conserve and catalog all of the current wild materials available. There are many institutions worldwide that have small to medium sized plantations of wildC. arabica individuals from Ethiopia. These and the still indigenous coffee populations themselves need to be preserved via cryopreservation or live germplasm form in order for us to be able to access them after the climate is no longer hospitable. World Coffee Research currently has a biodiversity Projectin motion to begin just this task. After the genetics have been preserved, we can begin learning from them. Analyzing their diversity and examining their physical characteristics (their phenotypes) is when we will see the true potential of the wild genomics. After we understand them and their unique qualities we will be able to use them for breeding and adapting our own favorite cultivars for future environmental conditions.
In summary, it is too late to reverse the effect of anthropogenic climate change on Ethiopia, but it is not too late to support wild coffee genome preservation.
BY SAMUEL ALEMU, 9 NOVEMBER 2012 Source: All Africa
Addis Ababa — The First International Conference on Ethiopian Coffee was opened here at the Hilton Addis yesterday. The Ethiopian Coffee Exporters Association (ECEA) in collaboration with the Ministry of Trade,USAID and Commercial Bank of Ethiopia organized the Conference with the theme:” Strengthening the Legacy of Our Coffee”.
The conference is aimed at enhancing the position of Ethiopian Coffee in international market through facilitating exchange of information and experience among stakeholders to address key opportunities and challenges facing the coffee sector; as well as promoting the uniqueness of Ethiopian coffee to spell out its vision for the future.
Speaking on the occasion, Prime Minister Haile-Mariam Dessalegn said coffee is a mainstay for more than 15 million Ethiopians who are involved directly or indirectly in the sector.
Haile-Mariam said that modern trading of the commodity and comparative advantage Ethiopia has over other coffee producing and exporting countries, has enabled it to trade in better volume, enhancing its global share in the coffee market and and thereby boost export income.
According to him, Ethiopia’s coffee production and export picked up over the past nine years to an export volume reaching close to 200,000 tonnes, generating close to 842 million USD in foreign exchange in 2010/11.
Moreover, over the past four years, coffee traded through the Ethiopian Commodity Exchange (ECX), which is the first of its kind in Africa, has raised it significantly reaching 768.8 million USD in the 2010/11; with a strong growth in volume amounting to 235, 131 tonnes. Coffee accounted for 74 per cent of the trade value in 2010/11, taking the lead in the commodity exchange market, he noted.
International Coffee Organization (ICO) Head of Operations, Jose Dauster Sette, on his part said that Ethiopia can sustainably produce and supply fine specialty coffee, with the potential of producing all coffee types growing across the world. Ethiopia is not only the birthplace, an important producer, and a leading exporter of Coffee Arabica, but also a heavy consumer, he said.
He also indicated that the structural, policy environment, sustainability challenges such as poor access to market and long supply chain, low level of public investment in agriculture, adaptation and mitigation to climate change and other adverse weather events are the major ones.
European Union (EU) head of delegation, Xavier Marchal noted that Ethiopia and coffee are the two sides of a coin. As a result, Ethiopia has to provide the world with profile of coffee and has to have better understanding of coffee to increase its competitiveness in the global market. Moreover, improving the quality and quantity of coffee in a sustainable base would play pivotal role in improving the livelihood of farmers, he added.
The Ethiopian coffee export in the international market would increase by at least 25 per cent from the present level, in which the export volume will exceed 220,000 tonnes and the foreign earnings will surpass one billion USD setting a new record of the economy’s foreign exchange generation with a seven digit figure from a single agricultural commodity in the history of the nation’s export sector performance.
Members of the ECEA, Ministers of Trade and Agriculture, the Ethiopian Commodity Exchange (ECX) and the Ethiopian Commodity Exchange Authority, local financial institutions, principal actors in the Ethiopian coffee trade and international coffee buyers are attending the conference.
Source: Views and News from Norway.
AUDIO REPORT: Tim Wendelboe is undoubtedly one of the biggest names in coffee in Norway. He’s won awards, been written up in the New York Times and a host of other publications, and remains devoted to his highly acclaimed coffee shop in Oslo’s trendy Grünerløkka area. It continues to be a magnet for those seeking what many claim is the best coffee in the world.
Tim Wendelboe, shown here in his Oslo coffee shop, has an international following. PHOTO: Emily Williams
A self-described “coffee person” – a definition which includes barista, taster, roaster, importer and author – Wendelboe recently celebrated the fifth anniversary of his namesake coffee and espresso bar in Grünerløkka, which also doubles as a “micro-roastery” and a coffee training center.
In addition to running the shop and roastery along with his business partner Tim Varney, Wendelboe imports his own beans and maintains a blog in English that is followed by coffee-philes from all over the globe. His tiny, exclusive shop on the corner of Fossveien is a destination for hip “Løkka” residents and foreign coffee pilgrims alike.
At any given moment, Wendelboe can most likely be found either in his shop (roasting, tasting and taking shifts at the bar) or jetting off to South America or Africa to meet a grower. Most recently the Oslo-native was in Colombia to visit the farm of one of his newest exporters.
With an emphasis on sustainability and individuality, Wendelboe hand-picks the small, carefully-sourced coffee bean farmers he imports from.
Wendelboe recently spent time speaking to reporter Emily Williams, who shared her audio feature on coffee and Wendelboe with newsinenglish.no. Listen to their conversation here