Agriculture: Saving Coffee
They had convened to discuss a serious threat: coffee rust, or roya, as it is known in Spanish. The rust is a fungus that infects the plants' leaves, making them unable to absorb the sunlight they need to survive. It has ravaged the region's crop over the past few years, afflicting approximately half of the one million acres planted across Central America and slashing production by about 20 percent in 2012 compared with 2011.
The outbreak, which is still spreading, is just one crisis looming over coffee in our era of global warming. "Most coffee varieties today aren’t likely to be able to tolerate disease and insect pressures, as well as increased heat and other environmental threats from climate change," Benoît Bertrand, a geneticist and coffee breeder at CIRAD, a French center focused on agriculture and development, told the group in Costa Rica after the coffee break. If crops fail, coffee farmers lose their livelihoods. They may tear out the trees and plant other crops or sell their land to developers—leaving a trail of unemployed laborers and environmental destruction. ...
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