Jacques Avelino is a plant pathologist at CIRAD, the French Agricultural Research Centre for International Development. Angela Records is an international agriculture rese arch advisor with USAID's Bureau for Food Security. Angela is the point of contact for USAID's response to the coffee rust outbreaks of 2017. Jacques has worked on coffee pests and diseases since 1986, and particularly on the epidemiology of the coffee leaf rust caused by the fungus Hemileia vastatrix. Since 2008, Colombia, Central America, the Caribbean, Peru and Ecuador have successively suffered epidemics of an intensity never seen before, with negative impacts on production and the livelihoods of hundreds of thousands of people. The 2017 outbreak confirmed the breakdown of the resistance of variety Lempira in Honduras, which had been cultivated with success since 1997.