Plate VI · section 18 of 19

What changed, 2023-2026

A worker moves a crate over a bin of robusta cherries, in a processing shed. — Canephora processing in a workshop in Lâm Đồng1500m Coffee · Pexels License

Four dated facts sum up the state of the species.

The share46.6% of world production in 2025-26 according to the USDA of December 18, 2025, a historic record. The projection published in June 2026 falls back to 44% for 2026-27, but it is a forecast, not a measurement.
The price5,849 dollars a tonne in mid-February 2025, then 3,644 in mid-August 2026. A record and its correction, eighteen months apart.
National recordsUganda exported 7.7 million bags in 2024-25, for 2.2 billion dollars. Brazil expected 18.7 million bags of conilon-robusta in 2025: the coffee tree alternates a strong year and a weak year, and this is the best off year ever seen. Vietnam projects 32.5 million bags in 2026-27.
KnowledgeKawuki's review, in January 2026, finds that a canephora variety takes more than twenty years to come out, and that selection long ignored the cup. The expansion under way since the 1990s now imposes three requirements: quality, tree architecture and drought resistance. Davis's review, in August 2026, undoes the legend of a climatically armored species and recalls that it drinks a lot. The first selection responses are here: the Vietnamese varieties TR14 and TR15, and the Ugandan clones evaluated for drought tolerance (PLoS ONE, 2026).

What remains is the matter of certifications, already touched on above. The CQI's Q Robusta ended on September 30, 2025, in favor of the SCA's Q Grader.

USDA, December 2025 and June 2026; Business Recorder, February 17, 2025; Cocoa Intel, August 13, 2026; Ecofin Agency 2025; Conab via StoneX 2025; Kawuki et al. 2026; Davis et al. 2026; “Intraspecific drought tolerance in Ugandan Coffea canephora,” PLoS ONE, 2026 (title as recorded, not read); Origin Coffee Cambodia, September 3, 2026

Gray areas

What the sources do not allow us to assert. We say so rather than filling the gap.

The exact year and place of Émile Laurent's discovery: Ukers writes 1898 “in the Congo”; other sources place his collections between 1895 and 1898 and Kawuki's review dates the first collections for cultivation to around 1870 on the Lomami. Ukers does not name the “horticultural house in Brussels”; the attribution of Coffea robusta to Lucien Linden (1900) comes from Wikipedia and was not verified against the original publication.
The introduction of Conilon into Espírito Santo in 1912: the date is taken from WCR and from Kawuki (table 1), but the origin of the seeds (Libreville garden? Java?) and the role of Governor Jerônimo Monteiro are attested here only by commercial pages; the Incaper chapter that would be authoritative could not be read (image PDF).
The thresholds of the Fine Robusta protocol (80-84.99, 75-79.99, zero primary defects, five secondary in 350 g, three quakers in 100 g) and the attributes of the R Grader sheet are cited from professional and commercial pages; the CQI-UCDA document itself was not read in full.
The breakdown of canephora by country in the USDA report of June 2026 (Indonesia, Uganda, India, Côte d'Ivoire) could not be extracted: the USDA PDF refused automated access on September 7, 2026. Only the totals and the figures for Vietnam and Brazil, relayed by the specialized press, are given.
Shares by decade (the 1960s, 1970s, 1980s) do not exist in the sources consulted in this form: the ICO publishes a 1963-1989 average (27.5%) and points in 1990 and 2013. The table in the margin takes this into account and does not fill in the missing decades.
Coste's canephora yield (700 to 1,000 kg/ha) comes from a table whose text layer is scrambled in the copy consulted; the digest recommends rechecking against the image of page 324-325.
The Ugandan target of 20 million bags in 2025 (UCDA 2019) was not reached; the figure of 7.7 million bags is an exported volume, not a produced one, and the 2024-25 production according to the UCDA was not found.
The precise mechanism of canephora's self-incompatibility (gametophytic system with an S locus) is not described in the corpus; the plate confines itself to the fact, attested by Denoeud 2014 and by the multiclonal planting guidelines.
The substructure of the Congolese group (SG1, SG2, B, C, then A, B, C, E, G, O, R) is known here from article abstracts and from the 2026 review; the exact correspondence between the two nomenclatures was not verified article by article.
The review by Davis et al. 2026 on the sustainability of canephora was read only through its abstract and the press (August 28 to September 1, 2026); its water requirement figures are therefore not reproduced.

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From fruit to cup

The world of coffee

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What changed, 2023-2026