SAO PAULO, Brazil - The Brazilian scientist who recently discovered
naturally decaffeinated coffee plants from a collection of wild Ethiopian
beans said yesterday reports that he had taken coffee plants illegally from
the African country were "nonsense."
The spat has underscored the potential money at stake over the rights to
genetic material of the coffee plants, even though the commercial potential
of the wild plants is unknown and a product could take at least five years
to get to market.
Decaf drinkers account for 10 percent of total coffee sales in the world, a
multibillion-dollar industry. Naturally decaffeinated brews could dominate
over the current chemically caffeine-reduced options in today's
health-conscious market.
"This has been absurdly blown out of proportion," Paulo Mazzafera, a PhD in
plant physiology at Brazil's UNICAMP university, told Reuters in an
interview. "I've never even been to Ethiopia ... I'm hoping to visit there
some day."
On June 29, Hailue Gebre Hiwot, President of the Ethiopian Coffee Exporters
Association (ECEA), demanded that Mazzafera explain how he was able to take
thousands of coffee specimens which he collected from Ethiopian forests in
the 1980s.
He told Reuters the plants were Ethiopian and the Brazilian scientist "could
face charges for illegally taking Ethiopian property."
Ethiopia's Prime Minister Meles Zenawi has also told Reuters his government
is looking into the issue seriously.
"If people had actually bothered to read my research they would know that
Ethiopian officials and experts were part of the international UN mission
that collected the wild varieties of coffee in 1964," Mazzafera said.
Commercial coffee grown throughout the world today originated in the high
forests of southwestern Ethiopia in a region known as Kaffa, which is the
eponym of the modern drink in many languages.
Mazzafera said the Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations
organized and financed a team of researchers from various countries to go to
Ethiopia in 1964-65 with the approval and cooperation of Ethiopia's King
Haile Selassie I.
"The area was undergoing heavy deforestation and there was concern over the
survival of these native plants," said Mazzafera. "The best genetic
collection of a species is always in the place where it originates."
The mission managed to collect a few hundred arabica beans from wild coffee
plants in the region. "I doubt these plants exist any longer in the wild."
"Copies of this collection were made - one went to Ethiopia, one to India,
also to Portugal and Costa Rica," explained Mazzafera. "It was from Costa
Rica's collection that Brazil eventually got its seeds in 1973."
Brazil planted the beans soon after and a few thousand trees have been
maintained. Mazzafera said his discovery of three trees that contained
virtually no caffeine was based on the Ethiopian beans acquired from Costa
Rica.
The ownership of the collection's genetic material is unclear. By generally
accepted standards, it is not possible to copyright a living organism unless
it has been genetically modified, like Monsanto Co.'s Roundup Ready
Soybeans.
"If these beans turn out to be commercially productive and we were to sell
them, we would then have no control or right to them once they left our
hands," Mazzafera said, adding that his project has received no funding from
the producing sector.
The collection of the beans also predates international conventions
regulating the ownership of indigenous plants, which are often poached by
rich countries from poor countries via smugglers.
Brazil's rubber industry, once a world leader, faded into oblivion after the
British smuggled Brazilian rubber plants into their colonies in the tropical
forests of Southeast Asia.
"Researchers have used the plants to look for disease-resistant coffee and
actually found some with resistance to nematodes and other diseases, but
nobody ever thought to look for caffeine content in the collection,"
Mazzafera said.Reuters:
