Deep in the Arctic, embedded almost 400 feet in sandstone, there lies over a million seeds, resting as a safeguard against catastrophic events. The seeds range from rice to maize to potatoes; all are necessary food items (and then some) for the survival of the human race and maintenance of crop diversity.
The Svalbard Global Seed Vault in Svalbard, Norway—deliberately located in permafrost—is designed to be a long-term storage of seeds, not for people to dip in and out of (personnel is only present on the deposit days). The last mass deposit of seeds was earlier this year, with over 14,000 seed samples from 22 seed banks, including 2,000 from Sudan’s national gene bank. The vault itself is owned by Norway’s Ministry of Agriculture and Food, maintained by Nordic gene bank NordGen, and partnered with nonprofit organization Crop Trust. Still, seed depositors maintain ownership of their seeds. Except for those involved in breeding, research, and education purposes, the depositors are the only ones who can withdraw them.
Despite being a crucial part of many of our daily routines, coffee is not one of those crops in the vault for one main reason: the seeds cannot survive the required conservation process and freezing -18°C environment in that vault.
Coffee has a recalcitrant seed, which means it “tolerates some water loss, but not the extreme level survived by orthodox seed. Water remaining in recalcitrant seeds forms lethal ice crystals during conventional storage,” according to the Center for Plant Conservation, a nonprofit dedicated to saving rare plants from extinction.
Those who work in the coffee industry already know climate change has and will continue to significantly impact the crop outcomes and livelihoods of the people who grow it. You might also already know about the breeding trials and research being done to produce climate change and pest-resistant varieties. This is for the short-term and is absolutely vital to the industry.
Long-term thinking, in the way of the seed vault, also needs to be addressed. And for that mindset, I turned to The Long Now Foundation in San Francisco, “a nonprofit established in 01996 to foster long-term thinking.” The “long now” part is the time between the last 10,000 years and the next 10,000 years. I will admit that a lot of their work goes over my head, and it’s hard for me to grasp intangible theories about time, given *waving hands* everything happening in the present. However, as you may have noticed, one way it shifts this mindset is to add the leading zero to the year, making it a five-digit year and an optimistic view of the future.
Roman Krznaric, research fellow at The Long Now and author of “The Good Ancestor: How to Think Long Term in a Short-Term World,” details six ways to think long-term. One of the six is “intergenerational justice,” where you think about a decision and how it’ll impact the 7th generation ahead of us. He writes, “Such thinking is embodied in the idea of ‘seventh-generation decision making,’ an ethic of ecological stewardship practiced amongst some Native American peoples such as the Oglala Lakota Nation in South Dakota: community decisions take into the account the impacts seven generations from the present.” Do we want people seven generations from today to be able to drink amazing—if not more—cups of coffee? I certainly do.
Currently, the coffee equivalent of the Svalbard seed vault is gene banks, either ex-situ (outside natural areas and in seed gene banks) or in-situ (outdoor, natural areas in field gene banks).
Both types of gene banks are resource-heavy, and the field gene banks are susceptible to natural disasters. As an example of this, Dr. Sarada Krishnan, Director of Programs at Crop Trust, brought up a typhoon in Madagascar that wiped out an entire field gene bank and illustrated the need for a backup plan. The Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations (FAO) has standards for gene banks that involve two levels of safety duplication. “One level is either in the same country in another gene bank like an international gene bank or in a regional or an international center,” she explains. “And then the second level of safety duplication is at the Svalbard Global Seed Vault.” Which, as mentioned before, coffee seeds cannot be held in.
Madagascar alone, she says, has a very high diversity of 60+ species. They’re not cultivated coffee, but they are Coffea species and necessary to conserve. These genetically diverse wild species might have useful genes like drought tolerance or disease resistance, making them helpful for researchers and breeding programs.
There are only four origin collections in the world for coffee, and one that is internationally accessible, which is the Centro Agronómico Tropical de Investigación y Enseñanza (CATIE) gene bank in Costa Rica.
“CATIE preserves the fourth most important coffee collection globally and outside Africa, the most diverse in the species Coffea arabica,” explains Daniel Fernández, specialist at CATIE’s Orthodox Seed Germplasm Bank. “Ninety-five percent of the accessions conserved are adhered to the international treaty on plant genetic resources.” The treaty he’s referring to is the International Treaty on Plant Genetic Resources for Food and Agriculture, which governs how plant genetic materials can be shared among breeders for research and development.
In 2017, Crop Trust and World Coffee Research published a report on the “Global Conservation Strategy for Coffee Genetic Resources,” assessing the current strategies and collections. About the global system for the conservation of coffee ex-situ collections, they write: “The first observation is that it is not a system. The current situation is of a set of nationally focused collections that are isolated from each other and from external users. In most of the institutions involved, the aim of conservation of the collection is to make it available to its own breeding program.” Nearly every country has its own gene bank and research programs, but that doesn’t mean it’s available outside the country.
Another conservation solution for coffee is cryopreservation, a method that involves drying and cooling the seeds, and then immersing them in liquid nitrogen. In theory, through research and trials, it can be done. In practice, it’s not so successful to the level of second-level safety duplication, says Krishnan. It’s been about 40-50% success, and studies at 10, 20, and 30 years need to be done. There also isn’t an international protocol standard for coffee yet, but other recalcitrant seeds, like the sweet potato, have seen promising success in cryopreservation.
One of the biggest blockers for ensuring that genetic diversity of coffee exists in future centuries is money. Crop Trust pulls a small percentage from an endowment fund to help maintain the operations of the gene banks. To get ahead of conservation—meaning, upgrading the collections, building infrastructure, and safety duplicating it in other areas—more industry and/or monetary support is needed. The best conservation scenario for coffee, according to Fernández, is the automated greenhouse, where ideal environmental conditions can be controlled. Of course, that’s if money isn’t an issue.
CATIE was established 75 years ago and, as such, has aging coffee trees in field banks. There have been moves to upgrade the systems and propagate varieties, but much work is still needed. Climate change’s indirect effects have also led to “greater incidence or appearance of important pathogens such as the case of Colletotrichum kahawae, or the mutation of these in more aggressive races, as has happened in coffee rust,” says Fernández. “In turn, the conditions of high temperature and water stress caused by longer periods of drought lead coffee plants to greater depletion that hinders an adequate physiological response to these pathogens.” Climate change has a cascading effect that must be tackled on many fronts, and the easiest path forward on those fronts involves having the financial resources to do so.
“A lot of people who donate funds for coffee researchers’ research—they look at the short-term gain,” explains Krishnan. Bigger-picture thinking is needed, and we can’t afford to play defense. “A one-time investment of $25 million in our endowment fund can ensure that these four gene banks are protected in perpetuity.” A handful of large companies could easily put in $2-5 million each. How do I know this is doable? The UC Davis Coffee Center opening I covered last year was privately funded with $4.5 million. And World Coffee Research announced earlier this year that member companies renewed a $10 million commitment to their R&D programs.
The intricacies of coffee conservation, breeding, climate change, and gene banks are far too complicated to review succinctly in one article—the Conservation Strategy document mentioned earlier is 72 pages, and that’s just strategy—but the short of it is that we need money. Funding and long-term thinking will back up and modernize established gene banks and support research. So that perhaps, in the future, we’ll have something like the Svalbard Global Seed Vault to protect us from catastrophic events and still serve coffee to seven generations from now in year 02220.
Jenn Chen (@thejennchen) is an Editor At Large at Sprudge Media Network. Read more Jenn Chen on Sprudge.
Top image courtesy of NordGen
