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Coffea canephora

As climate change renders the future of coffee production to be potentially precarious, can we turn to Coffea canephora once more to sustain a global obsession, retaining all the flavour it has developed in the past decades?

Today, with coffee having transformed into a way of life, it is hard to imagine a time when its future looked bleak. The cultivation of Coffea canephora in the early 1900s in Peradeniya, in British Ceylon, was a response to the half-century long leaf-rust pandemic that ravaged coffee farms around the world. With increasing temperatures and erratic rainfall threatening coffee production once again, even in high altitudes, the quality-oriented production of this resilient species may hold the key to sustaining the supply, and connoisseurship, of the world’s most popular beverage.

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COFFEA CANEPHORA WAYANAD, KERALA DIRECT TRADE COFFEA CANEPHORA WAYANAD, KERALA DIRECT TRADE COFFEA CANEPHORA WAYANAD, KERALA DIRECT TRADE

Arriving in the Malabar (The Malabar Migration)

Our canephora can trace its origins back to the migration of farmers from Travancore to the Malabar. Since our seeds were first purchased in the 1920s from larger estates already operating in the region, it might be inferred that the species might have made an appearance here within a few years of its adoption in Ceylon.

This predates selective breeding efforts that focussed on improving resistance to diseases and pests at the cost of flavour, and as such we have the opportunity to reinvent it with your palette as a priority; without reconfiguring existing ecosystems.

Colonial plantation cultures have devastated indigenous flora’s ability to relate with each other and while the effects of these are not discernible for humans, they are traumatic for both existing ecosystems and itinerant cultivars. We cannot erase historical acts of violence, but we can be conscious so as not to emulate them. Our saplings grow alongside their parents, offering them access to inherited mycelial networks and other ways of relating in a manner in which their previous generations were denied.

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