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Conservation and Use of Wild Populations of Coffea arabica

COCE is the name of a research project and stands for "Conservation and Use of Wild Populations of Coffea arabica in the Montane Rainforests of Ethiopia".

The project is financed by the German Ministry for Education and Research (BMBF) and carried out by the Center for Development Research, ZEF Bonn in Germany and with the Institute of Biodiversity Conservation and the Ethiopian Coffee Forest Forum in Ethiopia.

Background

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The montane rain forests in southeast Ethiopia, the birthplace of wild Coffea arabica, were the origin of a large part of modern commercially used Coffea breeds. Due to the dwindling size of the montane rain forests as a result of clearing, the precious resource of wild Arabica coffee, and the genetic diversity it contains, is increasingly threatened.

Approximately 40% of Ethiopia's land area was covered by dense forests at the end of the 1960s. This has now fallen to 2.7 percent. The former Kingdom of Kaffa in the southwest of the country is now a part of the Southern Nations, Nationalities and People's Region, one of the nine ethnic divisions of Ethiopia. The rapidly developing town of Bonga is the economic center of the Kaffa region. In the Kaffa region there are only 200,000 acres of undisturbed African montane rain forest remaining. However, these are extremely threatened in their existence, because of pressure on this forest region—due to the growing population, infrastructure projects such as road construction and investors plans—which has been increasing steadily.

List of key partner organizations

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Unannotated references

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