Tainan, Taiwan
August 31, 2012
Source: News from AVRDC, The World Vegetable Center
The year was 1899. Amid the spirit of a new millennium and a national race toward modernity, farmer and businessman Ichitaro Kanie began cultivating tomatoes and other little-known foreign vegetables in Japan. To help popularize the unfamiliar texture and taste of tomato and build his market, Kanie processed his harvests into products such as tomato sauce, puree and ketchup. Over time, the Japanese developed a taste for tomato.
Six decades later, the company Kanie founded—Kagome Co., Ltd.— began expanding operations outside Japan. In 1967 Kagome opened a tomato processing factory in Shanhua, Taiwan. The small farming community was one of several in central Tainan County (now Tainan City) making a transition from sugar cane production; with their flat topography, easily worked soil, and warm climate, Shanhua and other nearby villages were good places to grow tomato. The factory would eventually bring Shanhua more than 100 jobs for workers and production contracts for more than 200 farmers.
A few years on and a couple of kilometers away from the Kagome factory, ground was being broken for the Asian Vegetable Research and Development Center (now AVRDC – The World Vegetable Center). Founded in 1971 and officially opened on 121 hectares in Shanhua in 1973, this international agricultural research institute established by the Asian Development Bank and the governments of Japan, Korea, the Philippines, Taiwan, Thailand, the United States, and Vietnam sought to breed improved vegetable varieties with better pest and disease resistance for the humid tropics in Asia. The improved varieties would increase yields and income for farmers and provide accessible sources of nutrition for poor people across the continent.
Although the company and the institute would soon become fixtures of the local community, it wasn’t until much later that the destinies of all three were truly intertwined—by the actions of the whitefly, a tiny insect pest that spreads a devastating plant disease capable of bringing an entire agricultural industry to a halt.
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