Tim Schilling, a Texas A&M agronomist, notes the GPS location of an Arabica coffee plant growing in a small village in the Boma mountains.
BOMA, South Sudan—Tim Schilling trudged through the African wilderness, trailing a barefoot tribeswoman named Nyameron.
A sort of Indiana Jones of coffee, Mr. Schilling, 59 years old, was seeking wild strains of coffea Arabica, the fragrant beans used to make most of the world's lattes and cappuccinos. The Texas A&M University agronomist heads World Coffee Research, a nonprofit financed by Folgers coffee maker J.M. Smucker Co., Peet's Coffee & Tea Inc. and others.
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Close Specialty Coffee Association of AmericaAn expedition searching for new strains of wild coffee in the Upper Boma mountains of South Sudan.
The group's goal is to expand the global coffee crop's tiny gene pool. But after four days of hiking on this plateau west of Ethiopia, Mr. Schilling's 15-member expedition—which included a coffee taxonomist, a Green Mountain Coffee Roasters Inc. executive, agriculture students and hired porters—still hadn't found any specimens that seemed new. They were hoping that Nyameron, a wild-coffee connoisseur they had met through a Murle tribal chief, could help.
Companies are turning to exploration to ensure future coffee supplies because production has leveled off even as demand has increased, causing coffee-bean prices to quadruple since 2001.
The world consumed 17.6 billion pounds of coffee beans last year, up from 2.6 billion in 1982, according to the U.S. Agriculture Department. But production in Colombia, which provides 10% of the world's Arabica beans, has dropped 36% since 2005. Output in Brazil, the world's leading Arabica producer, recently hit a four-year low.
Many factors are causing coffee's problems, experts say, including climate changes in some coffee-growing areas and population growth in Central America, which has led to pressure to convert coffee plots into housing and shopping malls.
Coffee historians believe most of the world's Arabica coffee crop shares genetic ancestry with two 18th century plants: one brought to Europe from Indonesia, and another taken from Yemen and cultivated in Brazil.
That's why some coffee-industry experts favor expanding the varieties of coffee being cultivated and crossbreeding plants to strengthen them. "The holy grail is a heat-resistant varietal that provides quality coffee," says Patrick Criteser, chief executive of Coffee Bean International, which supplies the private-label coffees to such retailers as Target and Kroger and is part of World Coffee Research. "If we could develop that, it would solve a lot of our problems."
But efforts like World Coffee Research, which aim to persuade competitors to tackle common problems, face obstacles. Some of the world's largest coffee companies are pursuing proprietary research projects to expand coffee's genetics. Nestlé SA has a project it calls the Nescafé plan, which involves robusta, the other major type of coffee bean, a spokeswoman says. And Starbucks Corp. is conducting research through support centers staffed by agronomists who help local farmers, a spokeswoman says.
Ventures like World Coffee Research must also overcome friction with national research institutions that often aim to protect local interests, notably in Ethiopia, believed to be the fatherland of Arabica. There, hundreds of wild varieties exist, but government officials have sometimes had a contentious relationship with foreign coffee sellers.
Starbucks and Ethiopia reached a legal settlement in 2007 after the country sought to trademark its best known coffee beans. Ethiopia wanted U.S. patents on the names of its three best coffee regions, Yirgacheffe, Harrar and Sidamo, while Starbucks sought to patent a coffee with Sidamo in the name.
Some believe that without the cooperation of Ethiopia, efforts like Mr. Schilling's are unlikely to succeed. "Ethiopia is where this coffee started, and they have the largest concentration of genetic material by far," says Andrea Illy, chief executive of illycaffè SpA, an Italian espresso seller that recently joined World Coffee Research.
Mr. Schilling believes that global scientific teamwork on coffee's problems is long overdue. "Coffee is the second most important commodity in the world after petroleum," he says. "But there has been less research conducted on it than peanuts or kumquats."
A former expert on peanut breeding, he became a coffee-growing guru after the U.S. Agency for International Development challenged him to help revive agriculture in Rwanda after its civil war. He soon realized the answer wasn't nuts but coffee, and he set out to use scientific methods to help the country's small growers.
Mr. Schilling used geo-mapping software to calculate the best positions for regional "washing stations" where farmers clean coffee fruit. And he tapped a California mountain-bike maker to build bare-bones models that the farmers could pedal to get freshly picked coffee to the stations faster. Soon, the distinct tastes of different regions became more pronounced, and Rwandan coffee started fetching better prices among specialty roasters.
Mr. Schilling's recent destination—the Boma plateau—seemed an unlikely place to find wild coffee. But he was armed with a treasure map of sorts: an account by botanist A.S. Thomas, who wrote of encountering coffee in 1942 "growing wild and reproducing itself without human aid."
The coffee experts camped at a Christian missionary compound and trekked about six miles a day along narrow footpaths. "We're looking for genes that could improve taste or color" and plants with good drought resistance, said botanist Sarada Krishnan, Denver Botanic Gardens director of horticulture.
They soon found that much of the rain forest that would have harbored coffee trees in the past had been clear cut to grow corn, bananas and grass for livestock. The remaining forest was dry as kindling, the result of successive droughts.
"We really felt like we had a narrow window of time to collect these specimens," recalled Lindsey Bolger, director of Green Mountain coffee sourcing. "Not to sound hyperbolic, but we may have gotten there just in time."
Healthy Arabica plants grow 10-12 feet tall and have dark-green leaves, white flowers and red or purple beans. But the plants the expedition began encountering were too scrawny and stressed to flower or bear coffee fruit.
Then, on the expedition's final day, the weary explorers teamed up with Nyameron, who led them deep into the forest to a thicket that contained the most plants they had seen.
As the group walked back to camp, Aaron Davis, a taxonomist at the Royal Botanical Gardens in Kew, England, saw a small coffee plant unlike the others. Its leaves were narrower, waxier and spongier, and it appeared to have evolved so that it could retain moisture and ward off ultraviolent rays.
The plant's leaves were added to the group's collection of about 75 wild coffee samples pressed between wooden racks to preserve them for genetic analysis.
Now, scientists are analyzing the samples to see if the expedition really did unearth a forgotten Arabica plant. Meanwhile, Mr. Schilling is planning another expedition to Boma in search of more coffee secrets.
Write to Miguel Bustillo at miguel.bustillo@wsj.com
Corrections & Amplifications World coffee consumption exceeded 17 billion pounds last year. An earlier version of this article incorrectly gave the figure in millions of pounds instead of billions.
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