Conservation of coffee genetic resources: constraints and opportunities

Coffee is the world's most important beverage and upon which the economies of many developing countries depends. Although the coffee beverage comes from mainly two species namely Coffea arabica and C. canephora, there are more than 100 wild species,all endemic to the continent of Africa and the West Indian Ocean islands. This diversity represents a store of genetic materials on which the future of coffee improvement both in terms of yield and quality depends. The FAO, IBPGR, and ORSTOM have collected much of this diversity and tried to secure them in field genebanks. However the management of these collections has proved to be difficult to maintain and these resources have not been adequately characterized, evaluated, and used in coffee breeding programmes. In this paper we critically discuss the methodologies for both ex situ and in situ conservation of the coffee genetic resources with reference to case studies in Costa Rica, Ethiopia Madagascar and Kenya, discuss the value of these collection for end users, and describe the new advances made in the development of the conservation technologies for coffee germplasm.