Honduras. The average national incidence of rust, surveyed by IHCAFE, went from 7.57% to 8.44% in March 2026. A national average says little, because it mixes unaffected farms with ravaged ones.

The April 2025 survey is more telling. 16.67% of the sampled farms were at medium incidence (5-10%), 7.80% at high (10-15%) and 21.63% at very high (more than 15%). The foci were in Intibucá, Santa Bárbara, Comayagua and Yoro.

Production is rising nonetheless, which is not contradictory: rust amputates a yield, it does not cancel it, and other levers work in the opposite direction. The country expects 5.53 million bags of 60 kg in 2025/26, or 6.3% more, then 6.03 million in 2026/27. The orchard counts 330,000 ha harvested and 2.1 billion trees in production. The reasons given are nutrition, pruning, the maturing of renewed plantations and the adoption of varieties such as Parainema.

Elsewhere, the picture fits in two lines. Colombia has 84% of its orchard in resistant varieties (2021), but Cenicafé is tracking new local races there. Peru found in 2024 two new races able to get past the Catimors. Resistance is gaining ground, and so is the adversary.

The cost of rust for the world industry is estimated at between 1 and 2 billion dollars a year (Wellman, 2021). A range from single to double says by itself what the estimate is worth.

USDA FAS, Coffee Annual Honduras HO2026-0002 (May 2026); Daily Coffee News, 05/19/2026; USDA FAS, Coffee Annual Honduras (May 2025); STiR 05/12/2021; Agronomy 14 (2024); BSPP 2022, p. 7

Breeding. World Coffee Research's 2025 annual report, published on May 14, 2026, describes an expanded network. Innovea now covers arabica and canephora, in eleven countries that produce more than 40% of the world's coffee, Vietnam and Ghana having been added in 2025. TIME magazine named it among the best inventions of 2025.

Three concrete results come out of it. First, low-cost genetic markers for rust, developed with Cenicafé and the USDA. Second, seed sources established or strengthened in Peru, Guatemala, Honduras and Uganda. An improved variety is useless as long as its seed is not available near the farm. Finally, for the ten years of the IMLVT multilocation trial, a study. The trial compares 31 arabica varieties in more than a dozen countries. The result: resistance to rust depends on both genotype and environment.

This last point is not a laboratory subtlety. It means that a variety classed as resistant in one country may disappoint in another, and that a catalog never dispenses with the local trial.

WCR's F1 hybrid program gives the measure of the time the exercise takes. 43 crosses created in 2015, observed in the field from 2017 to 2022 in El Salvador, Costa Rica and Rwanda. Four finalists came out of it, all Sarchimor × Geisha.

Their results fit in four lines. 28% more yield than the controls. More than 84 SCA points on average for three of them. Immunity to rust, with cups above 90 points. And a first harvest at two years.

Since July 2024, they have been planted at 10,000 specimens on ten pre-commercial plots in Costa Rica, Guatemala and Peru: Aquiares, Los Volcanes, Alsacia, CENFROCAFE. Evaluation runs until 2031. From cross to verdict, then, the time elapsed will be 2015 to 2031.

That is why the stated goal of cutting a breeding cycle from thirty years to eight reads as an organizational target, not a measured result.

What remains is what the 2025 catalog already validates. Centroamericano (T5296 × Rume Sudan, released around 2010) and Starmaya are classed there as highly resistant and very good in the cup. Resistance and cup in the same tree: that is what had been sought since 1927.

World Coffee Research, 2025 Annual Report (05/14/2026); WCR, “Next-generation F1 hybrid varieties” (program page); Sprudge, 07/30/2024; WCR 2025, Centroamericano and Starmaya sheets; LC ch. 16

The clause is logistical. The seeds of an F1 segregate, that is, the plants that come from them no longer resemble the parent. The hybrid must therefore be cloned by somatic embryogenesis. This requires laboratories, specialized nurseries, and capital on the producer's side, who must buy plants instead of producing them.

Starmaya gets around the obstacle. Cirad and ECOM, between 2017 and 2019, use a male-sterile parent, CIR-SM01, crossed with Marsellesa in a seed field. A parent unable to self-pollinate guarantees that every seed harvested from it is indeed a hybrid, and without manual pollination.

The result is the first F1 arabica seed produced in bulk, at about 0.07 dollars apiece, half the price of an embryogenesis plantlet. The limit is known: the male-sterile parent is not fixed enough, and about 15% of plants segregate anyway.

In Nicaragua, one case shows what field adoption depends on. The NICAFRANCE foundation, at La Cumplida, Matagalpa, counts more than 1,500 ha with neighboring farms. It has been renewing since 2015 under agroforestry with Cirad-ECOM hybrids, and it is converting to organic. The reason is not conviction: producers can no longer pay for inputs.

The other fronts advance each on their own. Among wood fungi, Peck (2024) shows that coffee wilt disease borrows genes from other Fusarium. Among insects, the Brazilian leaf miner is monitored for its resistance to new molecules (2025). And Hawaii, the latest arrival in the geography of the berry borer (2010) and of rust (2020), serves as a laboratory for integrated pest management quantified in dollars.

What remains is the sentence that governs the rest: a solution that is not accessible to all producers is not a general solution. The genetics of 2025 is far superior to that of 1975. The channel that must put it in the hands of two-hectare farms is weaker.

Georget et al., “Starmaya: The First Arabica F1 Coffee Hybrid Produced Using Genetic Male Sterility”, Frontiers in Plant Science 10 (2019), 1344; Cirad, press release of 12/19/2019; BSPP 2022, p. 13-15; Peck et al., PLOS Biology (2024); LC ch. 16