WCR Releases 2020 Annual Report
Our newly released 2020 Annual Report updates our ongoing projects, looks at our future goals, and much more
In 2020, the world was tested in unprecedented ways, and coffee agriculture was no exception. The global pandemic and continuing climate emergency prove beyond a doubt that diversity confers resilience. "The climate is not warming to industries leaving crop development to chance," says Doug Welsh, vice president of coffee and roastmaster for Peet’s Coffee & Tea, and chair of the World Coffee Research (WCR) board of directors. "The world without World Coffee Research increasingly looks like the world without coffee.”
World Coffee Research (WCR) acts as a bridge between industry market demand and national research programs to bring tools and approaches with proven track records in other crops to accelerate progress in coffee agricultural research, driving value for the global industry, from farmers to consumers.
Our 2020 Annual Report, available in English, Spanish, and Japanese, provides the latest look at what we have produced through this approach, in collaboration with our global network of partners. The 2020 Annual Report highlights several accomplishments of WCR and our collaborators.
2020 Global Highlights
Ensuring high cup quality for the future—82 variety candidates and accessions evaluated, many for the first time, by cuppers from 22 organizations to select the best for possible commercial release
Expanding farmer access to good trees (healthy + genetically pure) across Latin America
- Assistance to 66 seed lots to assess genetic purity
- Confirmed the purity of seed adequate to produce 25.8 million trees annually
Supporting 16 countries to get better plants into farmers’ hands through advancements in DNA fingerprinting, seed lot cleanup, breeding program evaluation and training
Continuing a global network of 262 collaborative research trials located directly in farmers’ fields to test variety performance in 14 countries
Three new global public goods:
- Development of a rapid, low-cost, SNP-based DNA fingerprinting platform to accelerate variety cleanup and modern molecular breeding approaches for use by producing countries
- Modified Breeding Program Assessment Tool for Coffee (led by University of Queensland), a resource to assist coffee breeding programs worldwide to assess and improve their effectiveness in delivering innovations for farmers
- Publication of the most complete study to date of arabica genetic diversity and confirmation of its recent evolution
Our strategy supports 11 focus countries containing 50% of the world’s smallholder coffee farms and 32% of global coffee exports
