Ethiopia is the genetic home of Arabica coffee, and some of the country’s last moist Afromontane forests still hold wild and semi-wild coffee stands. German and Ethiopian conservation projects have long argued that if local farmers can earn a living from carefully harvested forest coffee, they have a stronger incentive to keep the canopy standing.
Reporting around 2018 on “coffee that saves rainforest” focused on investor-backed and NGO-linked wild-coffee value chains in southwest Ethiopia, where deforestation for farmland and plantations threatens biodiversity and the coffee gene pool itself.
The lasting research angle for Horn audiences is clear: coffee is not only an export crop, it is also a conservation and climate story. Protecting forest coffee landscapes matters for rural livelihoods, genetic diversity for global coffee breeding, and the survival of remnant highland rainforests.
Sources: Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung, UNESCO / coffee origins context
