NEWS

On February 7, 2025, a team of three students from the College of Asia Pacific Studies received the Excellence Award for their jointly authored paper entitled "Challenges and Prospects of Coffee Cultivation in Japan" at the 35th Yanmar Agribusiness Student Paper & Essay Contest, organized by Yanmar Agribusiness Co., Ltd. (hereinafter, Yanmar AG).

This competition, aimed at encouraging young individuals to freely discuss the future of agriculture from a broad perspective, has been held by Yanmar AG since 1990. This year's theme was "Developing Agriculture into the Food and Agro-Industry," and 47 papers were submitted. After the final evaluation, winners were selected for one Grand Prize, two Special Excellence Awards, and ten Excellence Awards.

The award-winning paper from APU was written by three seminar students supervised by Professor Tomonori Sudo. The students focused on the so-called 2050 problem, which predicts that the area suitable for cultivating Arabica coffee will shrink to about 50% of its current size due to climate change caused by global warming, and they explored the feasibility of coffee cultivation in Japan.

The paper was highly regarded for proposing a solution that leverages the environmental challenges of global warming to enable coffee cultivation in Japan, leading to their award.

Rino Ishii, one of the authors, reflected on the paper-writing process: "Professor Sudo provided us with a lot of feedback on refining our topic during our weekly seminars, prompting us to conduct additional research each time. Since coffee cultivation in Japan is still not mainstream, gathering information was challenging. However, we conducted field surveys in Aso and Okinawa, where we learned a lot about Japanese agricultural practices, which was a very valuable experience." The team divided roles for the research, with each member assuming specific responsibilities such as investigating soil conditions for coffee and examining the current state of climate change and coffee bean production, and they collaborated closely to complete the paper.

Regarding their award, Ishii commented, "We are all deeply honored. At the award ceremony, we had the opportunity to talk with many students from agricultural universities and people who will be working at the forefront of agriculture in the future. This experience will be incredibly beneficial in our future endeavors."

Authors of the Award-Winning Paper

Rino Ishii (College of Asia Pacific Studies, 4th year, Japan)
Miho Nakayama (College of Asia Pacific Studies, 4th year, Japan)
Ryotaro Matsuo (College of Asia Pacific Studies, 4th year, Japan)