GM Coffee - the ICO seminar, May 2005.
This report was compiled by Coffee House for Fresh Cup, the big American trade paper,
and appeared in their July 2005 issue.
*
Genetically-modified coffee will be on the market within the next ten years. Despite protests that is ethically wrong, or that quality will not be good enough, the deciding factor may be growers seeing it as their strategy for survival.
The plants already exist. Work started ten years ago, and disease-resistant plants will be generally available this summer.
The situation is so close that a seminar on the subject at the International Coffee Organisation in London, in late May, drew a full house of 200 delegates from across the world.
Chairman Ezzeddine Boutrif, of the Food and Agriculture Organisation, warned the conference that for the developing world, GM is the most important battleground.
“The coffee crisis put us under scrutiny as never before. GM will do the same, and provoke an intense reaction from the industry’s customers.”
Genetic modification is a bio-technology in which genes are transferred by ‘non-traditional’ methods. Traditionally, a plant breeder may cross one strain with another, wait years for the result, and maybe find he has achieved disease-resistance, but poorer yield. Genetic modification reduces the guesswork with a scientifically-calculated best mix of genes.
In coffee, there are three major targets – insect-resistance, natural de-caffeination, and controlled maturity, in which the berry-ripening gene is ‘switched off’, so that cherries become green and hard, but develop no further. When all cherries have reached the same stage, a natural plant hormone is sprayed, and the whole crop matures at the same time.
The opponents of GM protest that we are making irreversible mistakes.
Typically, Pete Riley of Britain’s Five-Year Freeze, told the conference of fears about ‘gene escape’.
“GM aspects travel, and pollen can spread over 26 kilometres. Weeds in surrounding areas have been found to need far more powerful herbicides than before. In the case of the infamous GM potato, aphids feeding on the potato were preyed on by ladybirds, whose total life expectancy was changed.”
Scientists deride this argument, saying that since the Syrians invented cross-pollination 5,000 years ago, some 95 per cent of the crops we eat have already been transformed in some way. They say they are simply bringing precision into the process.
Professor Vivian Moses told the conference that GM is the fastest-growing agricultural technology ever known, and that last year the amount of land used for GM crops was nearly three times the size of the UK (about most of the USA east of Chicago).
“Is the public against it? I can’t believe that farmers are sowing an ever-growing area with food that nobody wants.”
It is not, he argued, against natural laws.
“A gene carries no flag saying it comes from a fish or a strawberry. It is a piece of data, and
genetic modification is a way of using it with precision to achieve your target.
“Most maize, soya, oilseed rape and cotton grown in North America, and much in South America, is GM, and despite fears that we were all going to drop down dead, there has not been one authenticated health problem. One trillion GM meals have been consumed in the USA, with not one cough or sneeze.
“There is no evidence that any damage is done to the environment. Birds are not falling from the skies, and insects are not shrivelling up.”
Even data on consumers’ wishes is unreliable, he claimed.
“The surveys use angled questions - if you ask people ‘will you eat Frankenstein-food?’, of course they’re going to say ’no’!
“But in Stuttgart, Germany, they held a test. They divided a popular bread into two piles, one marked ‘GM’ and the other marked ‘non-GM’, although it was the same.
“They made the ‘GM’ bread cheaper, and it outsold the other by four to one. They tried the same experiment with French fries, and the result was 20 to one!
“In England, two thousand people were offered a drink of GM beer, and only twelve refused. So I am forced to conclude that public resistance is not what it seems.
“In the coffee context, I suspect that people who don’t get involved will lose out.”
Does anyone really know what consumers think?
Dr Peter Baker of CABI Bioscience, UK, told of a survey that said 75 per cent of all processed food eaten in the US already contains GM ingredients. By contrast, Francois Meienberg of the Berne Declaration reported that the Eurobarometer poll showed that 70 per cent of consumers do not want GM food.
“Coffee is marketed as a natural product, so your image could be completely destroyed,” he warned. “Coffee shops will reject it. The advantages do not balance the negative socio-economic effects.”
In England, Andy Fawkes of Masterroast agrees.
“Buying patterns suggest consumers want increased diversity with ethical standards, including organic and sustainability - how can GM complement any of this?”
Many more importers and roasters are vehemently against GM coffee.
In London, importer Simon Wakefield offers a familiar view when he says: “No-one knows enough about the long-term effects it can have on people or the planet. I believe there will be more pressure to produce healthy, environmentally-safe products, and this should keep GM out of demand.”
Also in London, coffee importer Ian Breminer, an activist for growers’ rights whose letters regularly appear in the in-boxes of world leaders, says his customers are against it.
“We get requests for statements that coffee is non-GM, and have never heard a suggestion that it is likely to become acceptable - no signs of any change of heart at all. I cannot see it happening. I think anyone with GM coffee will be unable to sell it to a large part of international trade.”
Why not?
Because it will be unsuitable for the specialty market, says Peter Giuliano of Counter Culture Coffee, Durham NC.
“Coffees of the traditional varieties fetch premiums. Any modified strain would necessarily replace traditional varieties.
“I’m not sure that coffee-growing countries really understand the impact such a decision would have on the suitability of their coffee to the only growing segment of the coffee market. Why would a producing country willingly exclude themselves from this market?
“It is possible that GM techniques may perhaps create strains that preserve the great characteristics of traditional varieties. Problem is, nobody has yet done this in any crop where GM techniques are used.”
One speaker at the ICO seminar claimed that he has done just that.
John Stiles of Integrated Coffee Technologies, Hawaii, is ready to offer growers his first disease-resistant plant, and will soon offer a decaffeinated plant ‘suitable for the specialty market’.
His company claims that current decaffeination technologies decrease coffee quality, whereas a caffeine-free plant will be good enough for the specialty sector, and also save the industry $500million a year on decaffeination.
Hearing this, some listeners questioned whether caffeine-free plants are desirable. It is thought that caffeine may exist as a natural controller of certain insects – but one speaker suggested cynically that perhaps God just put it there to wake us up in the morning!
(Although Integrated Coffee Technologies is based in Hawaii, those islands remain essentially GM-free. David Gridley of the Hawaii Coffee Association reports that “none of the coffee groups in Hawaii support GM coffee. Research being done in controlled environments on Oahu is not for propagation here, and is being watched very closely.”)
What clearly surprised delegates at the London conference was how far GM has progressed.
Christophe Montagnon of CIRAD, a French organisation working on rural development in tropical and sub-tropical regions, reported the world’s first experiment of its type, involving 1,700 coffee trees grown for four years in Sinnamary, Guyana, a place chosen because no nearby coffee culture existed. However, the site has been destroyed by vandalism.
“We actually produced genetically-modified coffees,” he told the ICO. “We did lose a lot of information, but our first results showed that the plants were significantly resistant to leaf miner.”
(Curiously, nobody knows what it tasted like. The researchers were not allowed to cup the coffee, and even more curiously, French import law said they could not take any samples home!)
Luiz Gonzalez Viera of Embrapa, Brazil, told of forty centres in his country working with bio-technology over the past seven years. Embrapa worked on the first DNA map of the coffee plant, which was speculated to both double Brazilian coffee production per hectare and save $198 million a year on chemical herbicides.
“We established a transgenic plant for herbicide resistance – this was different from the French work, because we used a different gene, and we worked with robusta. We are now working to make a uniform Arabica maturation, and these plants are now in the field. Some genes have already been identified relevant to areas affected by frost, and there are two projects going on in Brazil identifying genes relevant to flavouring.”
The most powerful presentation came from Dr Abdourahmane Sangare, director of a bio-tech laboratory on the Ivory Coast. He was the first to openly warn that a grower’s strategy for survival might dictate what coffee came to the market.
“We have many constraints. We are at low altitude, our plants are attacked by insects, we have out-of-date practices, so we produce 400 kilos from an area expected to produce two tonnes.
“Our ambition is increase our production, and transform our exports. Research has enabled us to produce the hybrid arobusta, with low caffeine and a good aroma. Eighty per cent of it is grade one, not far from Arabica coffee. It has shortcomings, but we have decided to invest in it, as we see a niche strategy.”
Genetic modification would be his farmers’ major ally.
“We need to re-plant and optimise, and bio-technology will help us. GM can help us combat insects, and will be advantageous to us in synchronising ripening. We have already achieved clones which can produce three tons per hectare with a low caffeine content.”
The Ivory Coast government is prepared to invest in this, and he politely challenged the ICO to support his research.
This did not go down well when reported to the coffee trade in both Britain and America.
“This is naïve,” said British importer Simon Wakefield. “Look at what happened in Kenya when they introduced the Ruieru 11 coffee which was resistant to everything - the cup profile deteriorated and Kenya prices dropped.
“If farmers had education available to them on topics such as cropping, harvesting, processing and bio-diversity, then they could make money and live happily.”
Geoff Watts, green coffee buyer and roastmaster of Intelligentsia Coffee, Chicago, suspects that some growers may be seduced towards GM by inadequate market data.
“I wonder if the engineers will have cup quality on their mind when they are fiddling with the genes? Will they employ cuppers from the industry to evaluate the results, and have patience?
“A good example of a gigantic mis-step is the Catimor experiment, the hybrid of Caturra and Timor that tried to capitalize on the hardiness of Robusta, but has failed the quality test.
“Growers who made the decision to replant with Catimor years ago probably regret it today, as they are routinely advised by coffee buyers to uproot the trees and return to more flavorful varietals. A plan that for higher value crops is better than one for simply stronger ones.
“So the important thing is that when GM coffee enters production, farmers are given the proper advice about their options. For the small farmer who has made progress growing high quality coffees to sell on the specialty market, it could be a terrible decision to switch to GM.”
Nevertheless, at the seminar, ICO executive director Nestor Osorio was sympathetic to the growers: “Brazil has gone through every experience in coffee, and yet it is still in a position where a large proportion of its crop can be destroyed by frost. Is it surprising that they take steps to protect themselves?”
However, several traders protest that many plants have now been moved away from the frost areas and from Brazil, Ensei Uejo Neto of Café do Cerrado told us:
“In Cerrado Mineiro and West of Bahia, producers using a combination of a very accurate nutrition program and irrigation have been getting more than 45 bags per hectare with notable results in the cup. So, if the reason to adopt GM technology is to allow more yield - it is not necessary.
“Many producers are understanding how ecological control is as efficient as crop-protection. For example, to maintain the weeds between the coffee lines gives two interesting results: a good weed diversity is an attractive environment for the bugs, decreasing the attack in the coffee trees, and after their life be completed, the coffee lines receive more incidental organic matter. This is a virtuous circle!
“Many producers in my origin know that the important thing is how we relate with Nature. So, if the focus of GM is to get more diseases and pest-resistant plants, it is not necessary.”
Nevertheless, many at the ICO meeting still wonder if the Ivory Coast has given a warning of what might come.
“Time will be the major issue,” says Dr. Peter Baker. “The coffee-growing areas will become warmer and substantially drier. A study from Brazil shows that with a one-degree increase in temperature, and a likely change in the rainfall pattern, their coffee crop will be significantly less.
“This is why Brazil is spending millions of dollars on research. And one day, when they have a major drought, they will say to the world: ‘we’re giving you GM coffee… what are you going to do about it?’
“And will the world’s consumers accept it? Probably… yes!”
ends-