US funds $8m coffee and cacao research lab in Hawaii

The US State Department is funding a new coffee and cacao research lab led by the University of Hawaiʻi at Mānoa, an $8 million first-year commitment that restarts federal coffee research funding after USAID's 2025 shutdown.

The department named the Feed the Future Innovation Lab for Coffee and Cacao on 15 October, one of eight such labs it is setting up at US universities. The agreement could run for up to five years, though only the first year's funding has been confirmed.

Eight universities, one coffee brief

A modest sum revives public coffee research, but it barely touches what growers say they actually need.

UH Mānoa leads the program with Clemson University as co-director. The principal investigator is Parwinder Grewal, dean of UH Mānoa's College of Tropical Agriculture and Human Resilience. Coffee partners World Coffee Research and the Coffee Quality Institute join university partners UC Davis, Michigan State, Ohio State and Penn State, alongside Mars, PlantVillage+ and the Synergistic Hawaiʻi Agriculture Council.

The research will span coffee- and cacao-growing regions in the US, Latin America, Africa and Asia. Priorities include breeding varieties with more resistance to disease and drought, improving farm management and post-harvest processing, building research capacity in producing countries, and economic studies on where agricultural investment pays off best.

Grewal said the lab is designed to “transform coffee and cacao science into practical benefits for small farmers.”

Replacing money USAID used to send

The lab follows years of lobbying in Washington by the Synergistic Hawaiʻi Agriculture Council and World Coffee Research, which began pressing Congress in 2020. It also follows the 2025 dismantling of USAID, which had funded Feed the Future Innovation Labs for decades; a USAID-backed Cornell-World Coffee Research breeding agreement worth $5.485 million was terminated last year after only $1 million had been spent.

The sums involved are still small next to the industry's own estimate of need. A 2023 World Coffee Research report put the additional agricultural research funding the global coffee sector requires at $452 million a year for a decade, a scale this single lab does not approach.

Hawaii is the only US state that grows both coffee and cacao commercially. Coffee leaf rust reached the islands in 2020, and the USDA gave the Synergistic Hawaiʻi Agriculture Council more than $6 million for rust research the following year. The council estimates this season's Hawaii coffee crop at 20.7 million pounds, down from 23.3 million pounds in 2023-24, a drop it attributes largely to the disease. Arabica prices have already swung hard this year on Brazil's harvest, a reminder of how exposed the crop is to weather on any continent.

Specific research sites and individual projects have not yet been announced, so the lab's first practical results for farmers, in Hawaii or anywhere else, are still seasons away.