Rare Coffee Species from Sierra Leone's Rainforest On Course to Save Climate-Vulnerable Coffee Industry

Great news for the world's coffee drinkers: there has been significant progress in a Sierra Leonean project to recultivate a historic local coffee species, which is better adapted to higher temperatures than the climate-vulnerable Arabica, currently the main source for commercial coffee.

There is great news for the world’s coffee drinkers with significant progress achieved in a Sierra Leonean project to recultivate a historic local species better adapted to higher temperatures than climate-vulnerable Arabica, the main source for commercial coffee. Lost from cultivation for more than half a century, stenophylla coffee, or Coffea stenophylla to give it its scientific name has been grown successfully at a pilot project in the east of the country following its rediscovery in the wild.

It took a five-year-long search by a Sierra Leonean forestry expert, a sort of botanical Indiana Jones, slogging mile after mile through dense West African bush armed with little more than a pressing of a dried stenophylla leaf dating from the 1950s, before the first wild examples were found.

With rising temperatures and changes in rainfall threatening to wipe out more than half current coffee production, developments in Sierra Leone offer hope for climate-resilient solutions for the world’s coffee drinkers. The pilot project is driving ambitious plans to establish stenophylla as the flagship product of Sierra Leone’s agricultural sector, a remarkable turnaround for a species once sold as Sierra Leone highland coffee but which had been quietly forgotten through history.

Much more work needs to be done to establish the commercial viability of stenophylla but progress of the preliminary project, funded by the Switzerland-based coffee trader Sucafina, has been encouraging.