Forum on innovations towards coffee industry & supply chain << SEA-EU-NET

Forum on innovations towards coffee industry & supply chain

Coffee is the world’s leading agricultural resource in value terms. It is a major source of revenue for more than 40 tropical countries, and generates more than 120 million jobs. Coffee is grown on more than 10 million hectares worldwide, primarily on small family farms: 70% of the crop comes from farms of under 5 hectares. Southeast Asia has the most dynamic growth in coffee consumption in the world. Vietnam and Indonesia are now respectively the 2nd and 4th largest coffee producing nations in the world. Coffee research aims at developing and promoting coffee production standards in line with the principles of sustainable development, that are also economically viable: promoting the ecological functions of coffee-based agroforestry systems, fostering ecological intensification through integrated pest management and developing resistant varieties, enhancing the sensorial qualities of coffees, assessing the impact of labels (organic, fairtrade…) on how export supply chains are organized in producing countries….

Published on 10. May. 2016

The session organized by CIRAD (www.cirad.fr) in the framework of the 3^rd ASEAN-EU STI Days was a forum on technology transfer focused on the promotion of several innovations of interest towards the coffee industry and supply chain in Southeast Asia. During this session, six innovative results from recent R&D projects and new technologies, having potential for industrial and commercial application for the coffee sector, were made available to various scientists & economic actors for the whole coffee industry and supply chain.

The six speeches covered different scales and stages of the coffee supply chain, from the plant to the terroir and from the field production to the post-harvest processing.

The overall outcome showed the needs for S&T cooperation and joint international research aiming at developing and promoting coffee production standards in line with the principles of sustainable development, that are also economically viable: promoting the ecological functions of coffee-based agroforestry systems, fostering ecological intensification through integrated pest management and developing resistant varieties, enhancing the sensorial qualities of coffees, assessing the impact of labels (organic, fairtrade…) on how export supply chains are organized in producing countries.

The forum also made it visible that many topics being of importance for the whole supply chain would need to be tackle through joint public-private partnerships, i.e. in setting up consortium on coffee research gathering private firms and investors, technical centers, public and private research laboratories, universities & engineering schools. As a follow-up, a joint bid to the H2020 call “SFS 11 Challenges for disease management: perennial crops in the tropics and sub-tropics” might be a first attempt, with the support of the European Commission, European coffee traders and Asian coffee plantations.