Aaah coffee...
The fuel that powers the global economy by keeping us awake through all that unpaid overtime.
The medicine that gets you through a meeting with your boss
while horrendously hungover.
Basically, you know, it will always be there when you need it.
Except...
What if it's not?
Because here's the thing.
Coffee is going extinct.
A combination of global warming,
pests,
and a nasty fungus called coffee leaf rust are threatening coffee as we know it.
More than 60% of the world's wild coffee species are expected to be wiped out by 2050.
But there's hope.
In the form of a long-lost little been recently rediscovered in the wild in Sierra Leone.
It's called Coffea stenophylla,
although it depends who you ask in terms of how to pronounce it.
And it's called Coffea stenophylla.
Stenophylla... I've been told that's incorrect.
Or stenophylla?
And there's also talk of another wild bean in Uganda, Coffee liberica,
that's also promising to help fight back against climate change.
And it's just as well,
because the world is hooked on coffee.
About 2 billion cups of coffee are consumed around the world every single day.
It's an industry worth an estimated $500 billion,
supporting some 100 million coffee farmers.
Coffee is an extremely global crop.
It is a major export for about 20 to 25 countries,
meaning the income that a country earns from coffee exports
might help pay for roads and hospitals.
Here's the thing with coffee.
There are some 130 known species of coffee in the world,
but all of that delicious elixir floating through our veins every day
comes from basically just two types of bean.
Coffea arabica and Coffee Canephora,
which we also commonly call Robusta.
For coffee snobs, Arabica is basically seen as the nice tasting one you'd buy
at an overpriced coffee shop.
And Robusta usually ends up blended into instant coffee.
And its Arabica, the nicer tasting one, that's suffering most with climate change.
It is very susceptible to diseases and pests
and it also has kind of a narrower environmental pocket that it thrives in.
Arabica is hypersensitive to rising temperatures
and this is already having a massive impact on coffee farmers right now.
Arabica is going to continue to decline in production.
Farmers are facing more pressure from diseases, pests and weather
and they need a plant that is more tolerant.
So that's why people have started to reconsider some of the other
hundred or so species of wild coffee looking for help.
And there was one person who kept coming up in basically every conversation I had.
If you have spoken to Aaron Davis.
Speak with Aaron Davis.
Aaron Davis.
So I went to Kew Gardens in London to speak to the man himself.
How do you pronounce Steno-phy-lla or -phylla, or Ste-nophylla?
It's Coffea steno-phy-lla.
There you go. It's steno-phy-lla.
Glad we got that one sorted.
It used to be widely consumed around Europe in the 19th and early 20th Century.
It was successful. It did pretty well for a number of years and then almost completely vanished overnight.
But reports about it from the time captured the imagination of Aaron and his team.
What they were saying is that the taste is excellent and that it, in some cases, is better than Arabica.
Now, when you hear that, you start to get excited.
But even more intriguing was that it could withstand higher temperatures than Arabica and still survive.
So it's not a core tropical plant like Arabica, it occurs in the lowlands where it's hotter,
and that starts to pose some questions around could it be used for climate change adaptation?
And if that wasn't enough...
There are accounts of it being resistant to coffee leaf rust.
And coffee leaf rust is the worst disease of coffee.
It annihilates countries, it causes farmers to go bankrupt very, very quickly. It's a terrible, terrible disease.
If that were the case, that would be a big tick in the box for Stenophylla.
Amazing. Problem solved.
Except no one knew for sure that it wasn't already extinct.
One of the only known existence of it were these samples right here.
Dried out and stuck to an old piece of paper from the 19th Century.
That sample right there in my hands is from the 1870s and was the biggest stash anyone knew about.
So how do you find a long lost species that might not even exist?
Well, Aaron and his team had to turn detective.
They tracked down the last known sightings of it to some forests in Sierra Leone.
But even some of the forests didn't exist anymore.
So no luck there.
And that turned up absolutely nothing.
So they set off on foot into the surviving forest, hoping to get lucky.
I mean, were you literally just going off, hoping for the best?
My job as a person that knows wild species is to find that plant in the forest.
Because when you go into that forest, there's just many hundreds of plant species, it's dark,
so you have to identify just from its leaves, which is which is quite tricky.
And then eventually,
they found one.
We often say that if we were doing this in 10 years time,
there might be a chance that it would actually be extinct in Sierra Leone.
Now I'd turned up to Kew Gardens, hoping to sample some of this mysterious coffee for myself.
But as it turns out, I never stood a chance.
So valuable is just the potential of this wonder bean to an industry worth half a trillion dollars
that Kew Gardens can't keep it on the premises in any significant quantity
because of the fear of bio-espionage.
The demand is so great for people wanting to grow this coffee outside of Africa
or in other parts of Africa,
that we have to be very careful not to pass it on to other countries.
But we also know that people have tried to steal this coffee.
This idea of people stealing it. Is that from here, from Sierra Leone?
I can't share any details of the nefarious recent history of Stenophylla
but we do know that attempts have been made to visit Sierra Leone and acquire the beans from illegal sources.
I mean, our our hope and our aspiration is that we can use Stenophylla to benefit the country where it's found.
They're the countries and communities that should be benefiting from this natural biological resource.
So with good reason, I wasn't able to verify how good it tastes.
But when this coffee was tasted by industry experts, it passed with flying colours,
and that only adds to its allure as a potential saviour of the coffee industry.
OK, so how do we get from a promising little magic bean
into actually transforming a multibillion-dollar global industry?
Farmers aren't just going to switch over to a new bean on a whim.
So the next step for Aaron and his partners is a trial project
where they pay farmers in Sierra Leone to grow it and see how it performs,
guaranteeing the farmers income while they continue their research.
But that's not the only thing going on with it.
Many people see this is the wonder bean
and it ticks nearly every box that you would need from a really good coffee crop plant.
But the yields are quite low.
So what we see is that initially it will become a high value niche crop.
Those people that are really into coffee, the real coffee geeks.
But our aspiration is to use Stenophylla in a breeding program
to develop something that's commercially scalable.
So that's where we are with Stenophylla for now.
An exciting, possibly game-changing prospect, but still some way off totally transforming the coffee industry.
But if just one of these wild species offers such promise, what about the other 130 or so?
Because it turns out Stenophylla isn't the only wild species that is offering hope of salvation.
This is Catherine Kiwuka.
She's based in Uganda, where coffee makes up a crucial part of the economy.
Uganda is gifted in terms of coffee.
She's been researching another of those wild species, one called Coffee liberica, also known as Excelsa.
And here something really exciting is happening
because farmers are already switching over to using it of their own accord.
It is a farmer-led initiative because they do experience these challenges.
The drought spells are very intense and more frequent.
So when drought hits, you're seeing farmers taking a decision to uproot all the Robusta coffee
and plant more of Liberica coffee.
It's quite resilient to drought, to common coffee pests and diseases
and also the yield is very, very promising.
This species is the one that is sustaining our coffee production in such times
when the droughts are intense and more frequent.
This is our go-to species.
The challenges we are seeing with climate change are asking us to rethink our coffee sector.
Should we keep burdening it with only two species
when we have a wealth of other species with full potential thriving in the wild?
And that's what it really seems to come down to.
Preserving as much genetic diversity as possible
and maybe reinforcing the idea that actually we need to keep some of these around.
If you lose Stenophylla or if you lose Liberica or something else, then you lose an option.
Some of the genetic diversity that is in some of these wild species may have really,
there may be some really useful traits kind of hiding in these plants that may help us solve future problems,
for example, like resistance to a disease that is not really known yet or really widespread on coffee farms.
The potential for that might be in one of those 130 species.
So we don't want to lose it.
Once it's gone, it's gone.
But with such promise being shown by just two of the wild species
that were previously slipping towards extinction,
hopefully we might now do a better job of keeping the gene pool as biodiverse as possible
and keeping our coffee flowing for good.