ABSTRACT
Crop diversity is central to sustainable agriculture production. It underpins today’s production and provides the raw material needed for ensuring continuing supplies tomorrow, in the face of a rapidly changing world. The wider a species’ genetic diversity, the greater its capacity for resilience to meet challenges such as diseases, pests and changing weather. While the worldwide production of coffee relies on a small number of cultivars with reduced genomic and phenotypic diversity, wild coffee trees represent huge reserves of genetic diversity. It is now generally admitted that the key for ensuring that coffee can survive as an affordable crop lies in the genetic variation found in coffee germplasm collections. This variation will help to mitigate the effects of unstable climate and plant diseases, as well as modify the wealth of health-related chemicals present in the coffee seeds.
