Organic coffee
Seventy per cent of the world's coffee is produced by small farmers; mostly in developing countries. Most of this coffee is grown using traditional, environment friendly farming methods. Around 60 million people rely on coffee production, either on small farms or on larger plantations, for all or part of their livelihood.
Coffee berries, known as cherries, grow in tight clusters on the trees and ripen at different times. This makes harvesting coffee labour intensive, as the cherries must be picked by hand. Mechanised harvesting has been introduced on large plantations to reduce labour costs, but picking a mix of ripe and unripe berries lowers the value of the crop.
GM coffee is now being developed so that all the cherries will ripen at the same time. The coffee has been genetically modified so that the enzymes, which control the natural ripening process, are 'switched off'. The GM coffee will then ripen only if it is sprayed with the chemical ethylene which 'switches on' the final ripening process.
GM coffee is being developed primarily for use on large plantations, which can take advantage of the use of mechanised harvesting and will be able to increase the profitability of their operations. As Dr Tewolde Egziabler from Ethiopia says 'Small farmers will be squeezed out of the market with GM coffee. It's a shift from a labour intensive to a capital intensive system from small farmers to large farmers'.
It may seem too soon to worry about GM coffee when it may be as much as 10 years before it is available commercially. But it is precisely because it is so far from commercialisation, that we have a chance now to stop it's continued development. Getting a product withdrawn after commercialisation is far harder than stopping it now by showing that GM coffee is not wanted by consumers and that it is not a solution to the problems of farmers in the developing world.
