There are rows of plants that do not resemble any Brazilian planting. Some are low, others grow upward abnormally, and each group has a different shape from the other. This is the experimental field of the Institute of Agronomy in Campinas, São Paulo state, which holds 15 rare coffee varieties, mostly unknown to consumers, that could become the genetic basis of the coffee of the future.
Agronomist Oliveiro Guerreiro Filho calls them “resources.” Among these varieties are racemosa, liberica, and stenophylla: names that do not appear on cafeteria menus, but are becoming increasingly central in agronomic research laboratories.
Why arabica is in danger
Arabica-the species that accounts for the dominant share of the world’s coffee-has a structural problem that climate change is making urgent: an extremely narrow genetic base. Centuries of selection for quality and productivity have made it vulnerable in the face of pests, fungus and drought.
According to a Rabobank report released in April 2026, 20 percent of the areas now devoted to arabica globally could become unsuitable for cultivation by 2050. Brazil, the world’s leading producer, is among the most exposed countries. Average temperatures are rising, rainfall is becoming erratic, and the seasons that once punctuated agricultural rhythms are becoming less and less predictable.
Rodolfo Oliveira, who heads the coffee unit of Brazil’s state research agency Embrapa, explains to the Reuters news agency that: arabica is “highly vulnerable to pests, diseases and climate change” precisely because its genetic makeup is narrow. The only way out, he says, is to introduce “wild” genetic material from less widespread but more robust species.
How resistance is transferred
The work of the Campinas institute proceeds by crossing arabica with wild species, then testing the resulting hybrids and selecting those that retain the qualities of the parent plant while adding the resistance of the “donor. “
Racemosa, for example, tolerates drought better. Liberica tolerates heat and has good disease resistance. The results of crosses already tested are encouraging: an arabica-liberica hybrid has proven more resistant to coffee rust, a fungal infection that can devastate entire plantations; an arabica-racemosa hybrid performs better against coffee moth larvae.
But the process is slow: producing hybrid seedlings, exposing them to harsh conditions, selecting the most robust ones, repeating cycles over multiple generations of plants. All this can take between 20 and 30 years.
Liberalism in Asia: a field experiment
While laboratory work is being done in Brazil, farmers in some Southeast Asian countries have already begun empirically testing alternative species. In Indonesia and Malaysia, small plots of liberica have been planted to evaluate its resistance to drought and heat under real-world conditions.
Jason Liew, founder of My Liberia, a plantation in the Malaysian state of Johor, says these plants tolerate high temperatures well and are disease resistant. A confirmation that wild species work where the climate becomes hostile.
For the Brazilian researchers, these testimonies from the field are useful: they confirm that the qualities they are trying to genetically transfer to arabica really exist in the donor species, not just laboratory hypotheses.
