Nestle Coffee Center has signed a memorandum of understanding with China's Yunnan Agriculture University to help the latter develop richer and more productive coffee plantations in Pu'er, a province in Yunnan. The goal is to improve and reinforce China's local production via sustainable development programs in order to place the country's yield at par with the top coffee producers in the world.
In a joint statement, Pu'er municipal coffee and tea industry bureau head was quoted as saying that the cooperation between the two institutions will elevate Yunnan coffee's name to the global stage by combining the strengths of indigenous and international growing methods. It will also benefit plenty of local farmers and foster tourism.
Pu'er is currently home to some 52,600 hectares of coffee farms and produces about 100,000 tonnes of coffee a year. Nestle is not new to working with Yunnan farmers, as it has already been doing so for the past 30 years. Their partnership has since 2012 developed seven new variants.
The next six years will see the transplantation of new tree varieties that have been cultivated at the Nestle Coffee Center and rolled out to different locations in Yunnan to find the best types of climate and soil (and other factors) to grow them, writes GB Times. The center's general manager Wang Hai also said that the first stage of the reinforced cooperation in 2019 would be to conduct testing and trials in three Pu'er counties studied to be most beneficial for coffee growing.
Nestle Coffee Center sits on 30,000 sqm of land at the Pu'er Industrial Park and is said to be the largest ever in China. Opened in 2016, it houses the multinational firm's processing, research, and training facilities. At present, China is the 13th largest producer of coffee in the world, from zero when Nestle first set foot 30 years ago to an annual output of 140,000 tonnes by 2016.
Most of the people around the world are not aware that China is a major coffee producer, though this isn't surprising as the coffee connoisseurs are not raving about its quality. In fact, China's annual production is that of El Salvador and Kenya combined. All this is about to change, however.
Yunnan is responsible for 95 percent of the coffee harvested in China. The location was selected because of its temperate weather, which is said to be perfect for planting arabica varieties. It is expected to see more of other types of coffee in the next years because of this new MOU.
