Tanzania Coffee Research Institute has interesting new research projects
African coffee industries are on the move – various plans are afoot to build and shape the coffee culture and national businesses. Tanzania is an excellent case in point – the Tanzania Coffee Research Institute is almost a decade old and is charged with boosting the national coffee industry via research projects.
How does the Institute work? Interestingly, its stakeholders are also broadly the same category of people it is there to provide a service to, namely coffee famers, co-operatives and coffee traders, processors and government bodies for example. The aim of the research projects undertaken by the Institute is largely to offer practical techniques to upgrade the levels of productivity and increase the quality of the product. Of course, this has the knock-on effect of boosting the profits of the coffee industry and its position in the global marketplace.
For example, one of the current preoccupations in the research of the Institute is to develop strains of coffee beans that are compatible with the climate and able to withstand crop diseases. Farmers are always on the look out for high yielding varieties and so this, too, is on the agenda.
It’s a long term strategy – according to reports it may be some 30 years before the whole project has the hoped for effects – but to date, the Institute has already made a contribution towards increasing the brand and productivity of the national coffee brand. These findings have all been noted recently in IPP Media.com