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Collectively the global coffee community let down its guard during the financial crisis. The coronavirus pandemic further eroded resources to combat Coffee leaf rust making outbreaks more likely around the world.
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Collectively the global coffee community let down its guard during the financial crisis. The coronavirus pandemic further eroded resources to combat Coffee leaf rust making outbreaks more likely around the world.
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Collectively the global coffee community let down its guard during the financial crisis. The coronavirus pandemic further eroded resources to combat Coffee leaf rust making outbreaks more likely around the world.
In 1869, coffee leaf rust (CLR) spread at the speed of sail. Steam ships accelerated the pace, but more than a century passed before the dreaded fungus had infected every coffee producing country. Eradication and isolation gave way to prevention and aggressive application of chemicals to protect the plants. Diligence became the critical factor in containing local outbreaks from global spread.
Researchers this week [June 28] say the industry collectively let down its guard.
“Current Covid-19 impacts on labor, unemployment, stay-at-home orders, and international border policies could affect farmer investments in coffee plants and in turn create conditions favorable for future shocks,” according to findings in a report published on the proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.
Researchers led by Professor of Mycology Catherine Aime at Purdue University, conclude “that Covid-19’s socioeconomic disruptions are likely to drive the coffee industry into another severe production crisis.”
“Past CLR outbreaks have been linked to reduced crop care and investment in coffee farms, as evidenced in the years following the 2008 global financial crisis,” according to findings in the report, which draws on the expertise of Aime’s colleagues from Rutgers University, the University of Arizona, University of Hawaii at Hilo, Santa Clara University, University of Exeter, and CIRAD, France.
“Management boards in coffee-producing countries would send agents out to farmers to make sure they had proper equipment, access to fungicides, sprayers, and access to information about how to prune, fertilize, and sanitize their crops. After 2008, many of those boards were eradicated or defunded, and farmers stopped getting updated information and access to equipment and fungicides,” said Aime.
The blight of 2011-12 in Latin America and Central America damaged crops on 70% of farms resulting in $3.2 billion in losses.
“Now, we’re in a worse position. The Covid-19 pandemic is taking away what few resources there were. That is leaving coffee crops around the world, and especially in the Americas, vulnerable,” writes Aime. “Resource-constrained coffee farmers subject to these conditions often experience a self-reinforcing feedback loop in which falling profits lead to reduced plant care. This sets the conditions for CLR to proliferate, resulting in further loss, and reduced profitability,” the authors wrote.
In turn, that has allowed the rust — that causes tree defoliation and significant decreases in yield — to spread rapidly. The pathogen reached Hawaii for the first time in the fall of 2020, the last place that had been untouched by the fungus.
Covid-19 has not only diverted resources away from coffee management, but it also closed borders — limiting or eliminating movement of migrant workers essential for coffee harvests in Latin America and Central America. Without crops being harvested, profits declined to levels below the cost of production, preventing investment in new rust-resistant cultivars and prevention.
Climate change further complicates the situation. As temperatures rise and rainfall diminishes in equatorial regions the proliferation of threats to the coffee plants has increased with more frequent outbreaks of CLR and infestations by the coffee borer beetle.
Aime observes that resistant cultivars tend to lose that resistance over time as the fungus evolves. “New cultivars are where the focus is right now because that’s a quicker fix, but it won’t be the long-term answer,” Aime said. “We need to get as much information about this pathogen as possible to solve this problem permanently.”
Aime has received funding from the Foundation for Food & Agriculture Research to start preliminary work on sequencing the coffee leaf rust genome and genotype rust races.
Researchers suggest sourcing coffee from more areas, including those not as severely impacted by the fungus; diversifying farms and livelihoods of coffee farmers; increasing prices paid to farmers and fostering more sustainable management practices; increasing coffee consumption and demand to raise prices paid to farmers; and developing cooperatives and partnerships to pool resources, knowledge, and funding for coffee farmers.
Without efforts to eradicate coffee leaf rust, global coffee supplies will dwindle causing prices to rise and deprive millions of a cash crop essential to their livelihood.
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