01 A bush nobody planted
It is worth being precise about the date, because the sources disagree: some place it in 1917, others speak generically of the 1920s and others date it to 1927. What is clear is that it was found growing spontaneously in a plantation on the island in the first decades of the twentieth century, and that no discoverer is recorded by name.
It is known as the Timor Hybrid, and in the reference registries it carries a code, HT CIFC 4106. It is a natural cross between two different species: Coffea arabica, the quality coffee, and Coffea canephora, robusta.
02 The chromosomal accident that changed everything
A cross between these two species should have produced sterile offspring. This one did not, and that is why it mattered.
Here is the technical detail that explains why this bush and no other changed coffee growing worldwide. Arabica is tetraploid: it has 44 chromosomes. Robusta is diploid: it has 22. A cross between the two should produce triploid offspring and therefore sterile ones, useless for breeding anything.
The Timor Hybrid came out tetraploid, with 44 chromosomes, which makes it fully compatible with arabica and fertile in both directions. Which is to say: it could be crossed with commercial arabica varieties and produce viable offspring. And it carried with it the leaf-rust resistance inherited from robusta, in particular the gene known as SH3.
It is also one of only two known sources of resistance to another serious disease, coffee berry disease. Two of the crop's major problems, and both genetic answers run through this island.
03 A lot of seeds to Portugal
In 1958 or 1959 — the sources give one year or the other — the Centro de Investigação das Ferrugens do Cafeeiro, a Portuguese institute devoted precisely to researching coffee leaf rust, received a lot of hybrid seeds from the island of Timor.
From that lot, the centre selected two plants for their particularly strong resistance. Just two. All the later descent comes from those two, identified by the codes CIFC 832/1 and CIFC 832/2, and from there the story stops being botanical and becomes industrial.
04 Catimor, Sarchimor and what came after
From 1967, the centre crossed those two plants with compact-stature arabica varieties. The cross with Caturra produced the Catimor group; the cross with Villa Sarchi produced hybrid 361, the origin of the Sarchimor group. In 1971 that material was distributed for field trials in several countries.
One nuance worth being clear about: neither Catimor nor Sarchimor is a single variety. They are groups gathering many distinct varieties with similar parentage, and from them lines were later developed in Kenya, Brazil, Colombia and Costa Rica. When leaf rust reached the Americas in the 1970s, that material was already in circulation.
A figure circulates online claiming that 95% of the world's coffee descends from the Timor Hybrid. It is a misreading of a study: that 95% was the share of world production the analysed sample represented, not the share descended from the hybrid. I found no reliable figure, so none appears here. What is defensible is to say that this bush is the genetic ancestor of a great many of the rust-resistant arabica varieties grown today.
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05 The coffee still grown here
Coffee reached the island in the nineteenth century and remains the country's largest export outside petroleum. In 2017 it accounted for 26.4 million dollars, around 24% of total exports of 108 million. It is grown above all in Ermera, which supplies nearly half the national crop, and also in Manufahi, Ainaro, Liquiçá, Aileu and Bobonaro.
The social scale is the part that most surprises: around a third of all households in the country are engaged in growing coffee. And the economic scale is the opposite: an average producing family earns between 127 and 200 dollars a year from it.
It is the world's largest single-source organic coffee producer, and it accounts for under 0.2% of the global coffee trade.
Those two figures together sum up the whole country. Timor-Leste holds a record position in a niche and an irrelevant presence in the global market, while at the same time its genetic contribution to the crop worldwide is matched nowhere else.
If you pass through Dili, coffee is the easiest thing to take home and the thing that best explains the country. And it is worth knowing, while you drink it, that the bush from which half a dozen of the world's resistant varieties descend appeared on its own, with nobody looking for it, on a hillside a couple of hours from the city.
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