Farmers in Mexico Fight Coffee Disease With Resistant Varieties and Agroforestry

  • Indigenous Mixe farmers in Mexico’s Sierra Norte highlands are testing dozens of coffee varieties and developing agroforestry systems in order to combat coffee leaf rust, a fungal disease that spread to the region and devastated coffee production.
  • The project tests the resistance of over 27 different varieties of coffee within a shaded agroforestry system that helps decrease temperatures and create drier conditions – reducing the fungi’s spread.
  • Cultivating organic coffee in times of unpredictable weather is risky, costly and a laborious exercise. The cost of production is also growing, affecting farmers’ eagerness and capacity to cultivate.

SANTIAGO ATITLÁN, Mexico – Lucio Jimenez Ocampo is always surrounded by coffee. In the yard of his house in Santiago Atitlán nestled in the Oaxaca state’s Sierra Norte highlands, there are about a hundred organic coffee plants of different varieties packaged in plastic bags.

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