Matas de Rondônia

Fifteen municipalities in the western Amazon, and the only place in the world where canephora carries a denomination of origin. Brazil’s national institute of industrial property granted it in 2021, on an application from Caferon, the regional growers’ association — the first such recognition anywhere for canephora, and the first for canephora produced sustainably, with indigenous growers among its producers.

INPI delimited the area by parallel and meridian: between ten and fourteen degrees south, sixty and sixty-four degrees west. That is four degrees of latitude, all of it in the basin, all of it hot — which is the condition arabica cannot take and canephora can.

What grows here is not quite Conilon and not quite Robusta. The plants are intervarietal hybrids of the two botanical varieties, selected over decades to express both in an Amazonian climate — high heat, high humidity, and the moderate water deficit that comes with a dry season in a rainforest.

Embrapa Rondônia released BRS Ouro Preto in 2013, the first coffee cultivar the institute ever protected, and followed it in 2019 with ten more canephora hybrids bred to widen the genetic base of coffee growing in the region. BRS 2299 is one of them: a conilon × robusta hybrid clone with a productive potential above 110 bags to the hectare, resistant to leaf rust and to nematodes, and released for the western Amazon and north-western Mato Grosso.