News

At the beginning of October, a five-year, $36.4 million initiative funded by the U.S. Department of Agriculture to build the agricultural sectors of coffee and cacao in five countries—El Salvador, Guatemala, Nicaragua, Honduras and Peru—was announced by the project’s lead implementation partner, the international nonprofit TechnoServe. World Coffee Research is proud to bring its expertise in coffee agricultural R&D to the effort, the Maximizing Opportunities in Coffee and Cacao in the Americas (MOCCA) Project.

Julio Alvarado Quintana has had a close relationship coffee spanning more than a decade. Over that time, he has progressed from coffee enthusiast, to coffee student while earning his master’s at the University of Udine, Trieste and Fondazione Ernersto Illy (aka illy University), to coffee researcher—he currently serves as a Research Technician contributing to WCR’s breeding program and agronomic trials in Central America. We talked to Julio to learn more about his journey and why coffee is so important to him.

One prominent academic figure helping the fight against coffee leaf rust is Dr. Cathie Aime, a mycologist at Purdue University, who broadly studies the systematics of rust fungi. She is one of the few scientists in the world—and the only one in the United States—who focuses on this area of research.

In her second feature-length article for Standart Magazine, World Coffee Research’s Hanna Neuschwander reflects on how new varieties—better coffee trees with higher yield and better cup quality—could become the future of coffee … if the bet on F1 hybrid pays off.