A World Coffee Research study traces the history of the Coffea arabica species and found it is likely that C. arabica came from one ancestral plant from 10,000 to 20,000 years ago.
“This means that a single plant, a super-individual, has given birth to the whole C. Arabica species and to the millions of trees that are cultivated today all over the world in the intertropical belt,” says co-author and coffee breeder Benoit Bertrand of CIRAD.
The study was published in Nature Scientific Reports, with the results expected to have “important implications for the future of coffee breeding programs worldwide, which typically seek to exploit genetic diversity to help farmers meet challenges ranging from a changing climate to diseases and pests,” according to World Coffee Research.
