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thus high quality. "Te solution lies in assembling new and better resistant genes from wild cofee plants...we're confdent the research we're doing together with the excellent work of the national programs in Colombia, Brazil, and Kenya will alleviate the problem," Shilling adds. Research like this is critical for us in our industry for the very reasons of climate change, mutating and resistance-developing pests attacking our product, and to protect the livelihoods of countless people internationally—all while keeping the pursuit of quality at the forefront. But research eforts such as those underway under WCR do not come without a steep price tag, which is surely one of the reasons, as Schilling notes, that out of 37 Arabica-producing countries, only seven have some kind of research capacity. "Of those seven, only two have real research muscle," he says. Since governments in most cofee-producing countries do not have the resources—or perhaps the wherewithal—to fund or prioritize such work, WCR looks to the cofee-roasting industry as users of the raw green cofee product to fund research eforts. What the future of our industry looks like can be called into question as we increasingly face these outbreaks, whether they stem from climate change or from a broken business model in the production of our raw material or the prices we pay. Ric Rhinehart, executive director of the SCAA, reminds us of the challenges we face: "We must defne a value proposition for cofee that delivers sufcient returns to farmers for them to not only survive but thrive," says Rhinehart. "We must deliver a cofee experience to consumers that creates a market value for the product that can sustain the supply chain. While these market forces will play out appropriately in the long term, in the short term we must create policy that will allow for collaborative approaches to the near term problems and that will create the necessary institutional capacity for long term solutions." 82 barista magazine La Roya What it is: Coffee plant-attacking fungus What happens: Affected leaves drop and fruit will not ripen Next year: All plant energy goes to new leaves, not cherry production