In a news that will undoubtedly stir millions of coffee lovers around the world, farmers on the American continent are facing a catastrophic season this year due to a growing coffee plant disease, with losses expected to hit billions of dollars.
The disease is known as "rusting coffee leaves." This disease sweeps coffee fields where it may last for years and, in Sri Lanka, led to the collapse of the coffee industry during the 1980s.
In the 1970s, Latin American countries tried to plant rust-proof coffee, but the danger is still imminent. The figures show that 70 percent of Central American coffee fields have been infected.
The disease usually destroys coffee leaves, and one of the affected coffee producers in Guatemala says the recent wave is the most severe of our time.
According to the Daily Mail newspaper of the American University of Pordio, the losses from the disease in Central America will reach 3.2 billion dollars, and affected major companies overseeing the production of important shares of coffee in the world.
The problem, according to the paper, threatens to eliminate the coffee crop in Latin America in full, a major producer of the substance, which will affect the impact on the availability of coffee, and its price as well.
Kathy Im, a researcher in the field of fungi, explains that the disease is old and goes back more than a century, but scientists have not yet understood his life cycle and the difficulty of this disease in its very small molecules.
In addition, this plant disease can resist drugs, and scientists today are trying to understand the nature of the genes in the disease to inhibit its development in order to maintain the availability of a cup of coffee that prints the lives of millions a day.
