The town of Lipa (now Lipa City) became the biggest producer of arabica in the 1880s, but collapsed when the coffee rust disease arrived in the 1890s, killing almost all coffee arabica plants, which threatened the variety with extinction.
In the last decades of the nineteenth century, coffee rust did serious damage to the coffee plantations of Sri Lanka, Philippines, Java and Malaya, which led to the collapse of the coffee industry in Lipa, Batangas and almost putting the extinction of the Arabica variety.
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Coffee serves as the obligate host of coffee rust, that is, the rust must have access to and come into physical contact with coffee (Coffea arabica) in order to survive.