I was stationed in Singapore for two years, beginning in 2007. It goes without saying that there is no agricultural market in Singapore, and so using this country as a base I expanded business throughout Southeast Asia. With my long experience doing business in Africa, Asia was a completely new experience for me. Virtually every week I traveled on business trips to neighboring countries, and the patterns of my trips gradually changed from just visiting the capital cities to visiting the areas around the capital cities to visiting major agricultural areas. Our theme question, “How much can we contribute to the agriculture and the safety of food in this country?” was always in the forefront of my mind as I conducted business during these trips. Then one day I found myself making frequent visits to Indonesia and threw myself into efforts to develop pest control using pheromones, as this website also describes.

Indonesia has a population of 250 million, the third largest population in Asia after China and India, and this is probably a factor in the unique influence and presence the country exerts in the Asia region. The staple food is rice, with rice paddies covering an area six times that in Japan. Making good use of the tropical climate, rice is harvested two or three times a year. Of course, various other agricultural products are cultivated besides rice, and of these eschalots are particularly characteristic of Indonesian agriculture and cuisine. Eschalots are perennials, members of the Alliaceae family and look very similar to Japanese rakkyo onions. Dried, sliced, and fried, eschalots are used to enhance flavor in a diverse range of dishes much as yakumi negi (onion relish) is in Japan. Whether as food ingredients or agricultural products, the importance of eschalots in Indonesia is conspicuous.

Eschalots are cultivated as a subsidiary crop in the rice paddies. Around June, when the rainy season turns into the dry season, fields that just before had been rice paddies spreading as far as the eye can see turn into fields of eschalots spreading as far as the eye can reach. Everywhere you look is the green of these onions. I had never before seen a single vegetable cultivated over such a broad area, and initially I was extremely surprised.

A pest called the beet armyworm (Spodoptera exigua) causes extensive damage to this crop, and insecticides for protecting the eschalots are currently being distributed. However, because this pest acquires resistance to various insecticides easily, the effectiveness of a newly introduced pesticide fades over time and the vicious cycle continues.

Thus we began putting our efforts to control this pest using pheromone technology. This technology, which has a very low environmental impact, involves using the synthetic pheromones to disrupt mating communication between males and female pest and therefore lowering the population density of the next generation. This method is expected to be even more effective when used over a wide area. Although eschalot fields appear to the eye to cover a wide area, in actual fact each plot is not very large, with peasant families working approximately 0.2 hectare of farmland each. This means that there numerous peasants exist, but they have created a unique way to protect the eschalots based on their long years of experience, and they are above all very conservative! It is therefore a huge challenge not only for our company but also for our local partners to help such people understand this environmentally friendly product and then have them actually use it.

Now that I am back in Japan after finishing my overseas assignment I am now continuing my involvement with this project from company headquarters. What kind of country is Indonesia? How can we get farmers interested in this pest control method? Even now I talk everyday with our local partners to find a way to revolutionize eschalot cultivation methods in Indonesia.