New Delhi: When it was first noticed a few years ago that traditional sources of coffee were disappearing, thanks to climate change, the need was felt to find genes that could help develop coffee varieties that would be able to produce a hotter coffee. can grow on a planet that is drying up. Day.
But breeding new varieties of coffee is a slow process. Coffee crop takes 2-3 years to mature and may take at least 20 years To bring new variety in the market.
However, even though efforts are on to develop new varieties, scientists in Finland claim to have produced coffee from cell cultures in their laboratory. And its aroma and taste clearly resemble real coffee, Reuters news agency reported.
In addition, according to the report, coffee produced by scientists at Finland’s VTT Technical Research Center could be “more sustainable”.
Citing researcher Heikki Aisala at Finland’s VTT Technical Research Center and in charge of evaluating the process, the report states that cups of cellular coffee may not yet pass the standard taste test, but they have “great potential.” are “a multi-billion dollar global industry”.
“It tastes like a combination of different types of coffee. We are not yet with the commercial variety, but it definitely looks like coffee at the moment,” Aisala was quoted as saying.
‘More durable’
Coffee produced by Finnish scientists could, as Reuters reports, be a “more sustainable alternative to growing coffee beans by floating cell cultures in bio-reactors filled with nutrient medium used to make various animal and plant-based products”. Is. .
The high demand in coffee growing countries in the world is bringing more and more land under the crop, leading to deforestation. VTT research team leader Heiko Rischer told Reuters that the cell cultures grown in the lab offer a more sustainable way to produce coffee.
Risher also listed the environmental benefits of lab-grown coffee, including “less use of pesticides and fertilizers and less need to ship coffee beans long distances to markets”.
In Europe, lab-grown coffee would need to be approved as a ‘novel food’ before marketing, the report said.
Why are natural sources of coffee drying up?
In 2017, a study published in the journal Nature highlighted how global warming is making it difficult to grow coffee in Ethiopia and other traditional coffee-producing regions.
British botanist Aaron P. Davies, who was part of the team that conducted the study, described the fate of coffee for 30 years.
A 2019 report in The New York Times described how Davis trekked into forests and mapped where coffee might be grown further—in places that are cooler.
Their research found that wild coffee varieties found on at least three continents are at risk of extinction, all due to climate change and deforestation.
As the NYT reports, Davis’ team concluded that 60 percent of the world’s 124 wild coffee species are at risk of extinction.
The study was published in January 2019 in Global Change Biology.
The 124 species include Arabica, the world’s most popular coffee bean that has been cultivated in East Africa for hundreds of years, and Robusta, another variety that has been quite popular for the past 100 years. Most other wild varieties are not cultivated or consumed.
The Crop Trust, which runs a global seed bank, in a 2018 report called for preserving the genetic diversity of coffee, including wild varieties, to prevent them from disappearing.
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