In August 2020, inside the cupping room of a London roastery, a team of botanists and baristas gathered to taste a coffee species that most believed had been lost forever. It was an important moment. Coffee experts had spent years searching in West Africa for the few remaining trees of this species, even issuing "wanted posters" to farmers asking if they had seen it.

The coffee, stenophylla, had last been recorded in Sierra Leone in the 1950s, but civil war and widespread deforestation had pushed it to the brink of extinction. In 2018, with the help of the Royal Botanic Gardens in Kew, a small cluster of stenophylla trees were found, which two years later produced just nine grams of beans. The first sips provided hope. "It’s fragrant, fruity and sweet," said Aaron Davis, Kew’s senior research leader for Crops and Global Change. "Stenophylla is a coffee with real potential."

Since then, seeds have been collected from the surviving trees in Sierra Leone, and 5,000 seedlings are being grown in nurseries. This is significant for us all, not just coffee aficionados. That’s because saving diverse foods, whether plant species or animal breeds, will give us the options we’ll need in an increasingly uncertain future.

The decline in the diversity of our food, and the fact that so many foods have become endangered, didn’t happen by accident; it is an entirely human-made problem. The biggest loss of crop diversity came in the decades that followed the Second World War when, in an attempt to save millions from starvation, crop scientists found ways to produce grains such as rice and wheat on a phenomenal scale. To grow the extra food the world desperately needed, thousands of traditional varieties were replaced by a small number of new, super-productive ones. The strategy that ensured this — more agrochemicals, more irrigation, plus new genetics — came to be known as the "Green Revolution."

Read the full article about global food diversity by Dan Saladino at GreenBiz.