Over 98% of the world’s known cultivated varieties of Coffea arabica, can be traced back to Yemen. The arabica species, which was found wild in the forests of Ethiopia, travelled to Yemen at least 600 years ago, where it was grown as a cultivated crop, likely for the first time in the crop’s history. As it went from the lush forests of Ethiopia to the arid mountains of Yemen, the genetics of the Yemeni trees would change over time to adapt to the new environment through domestication and natural selection. Coffee cultivation continued in Yemen for the next 300 years, during which the genetics of the Yemeni coffee trees gradually changed through domestication and a process known as genetic drift, such that they became distinctly different from their Ethiopian ancestors. These unique trees would go on to become the ‘mother’ trees of almost all of the cultivated varieties known today.

On August 14th 2020, Qima Coffee announced the discovery of an entirely new genetic mother population in the Arabica coffee species that was previously unknown to the coffee world – Yemenia. The scientific study which was led by Qima Coffee (Yemen), RD2 Vision (France) and CATIE (Costa Rica), involved conducting the largest genetic survey in Yemen’s history, covering an area of over 25,000km2 and the findings are considered amongst the most significant genetic discoveries in Yemen’s coffee history. Alongside this discovery, the study also established that Yemen holds the entire world’s cultivated coffee genetic pool, representing a microcosm of the world’s coffee varieties.

We are also extremely proud to announce that the study was peer-reviewed and recently published in the international journal of Genetic Resources and Crop Evaluation (GRACE) and represents the first global published scientific study that sheds light on C.arabica coffee’s genetic landscape in Yemen.