Kochi :
Baba Budangiri, 250 km from Bengaluru, where coffee was first grown in India, is going for Geographical Indication (GI) of its variety of the Arabica brew.
On January 1, the Coffee Board filed an application for the GI tagging of Baba Budangiri Arabica and four other varieties — Coorg Arabica, Wayanad Robusta, Chikmagalur Arabic and Araku Valley Arabica — with the Geographical Indication Registry at Chennai.
Coffee Board head (coffee quality) K Basavaraj said: “We have applied for the GI marker and we are also profiling the majority variety grown in Baba Budangiri, a variety called Selection-795,” Basavaraj said. Selection-795 (S-795) is considered to be the natural descendant of two of the oldest African cultivars of coffee — Coffea Arabica and Coffea Liberica — and a third variety is called Kent. Currently, S-795 is the most prominent coffee grown at Baba Budangiri.
Edmund Hull in his book ‘Coffee Planting in Southern India and Ceylon’ says that Coffea Arabica originated in Caffa in southern Abyssina and then found its way to Yemen. According to John Shortt’s ‘A Handbook on Coffee Planting in Southern India’, Baba Budan (Baba Booden), a Muslim pilgrim, brought the brew from Mocha, a port city in Yemen, in the 17th century and introduced the variety in the uninhabited hills that came to be known as Baba Budangiri.
Today, Baba Budangiri Arabica is grown acorss 15,000 hectares around the original hills, where it was first planted. Over the last few centuries, coffee plantations grew beyond Baba Budangiri and the adjoining Chickmagalur and spread to Kodagu and Hassan in Karnataka, and Wayanad, Travancore and Nelliampathy regions of Kerala. It is also grown in the hilly regions of Palani, Shevroy, Nilgiris and Anamalais in Tamil Nadu. The non-traditional areas of coffee-growing in India includes certain pockets in Andhra Pradesh, Orissa, Assam, Arunachal Pradesh, Manipur, Meghalaya, Mizoram and Nagaland.
source: http://www.timesofindia.indiatimes.com / The Times of India / News> Business News> India Business News / by Shenoy Karun / TNN / January 06th, 2018
