It’s called the Kimito, and it’s the apple in a man’s eye. A university in northern Japan is keen to break into the international fruit market.
The apple variety developed by Hirosaki University in Aomori Prefecture will be grown in faraway South Africa under an agreement with a Tokyo-based trading company.
The agreement with Wismettac Foods Inc., a subsidiary of Tokyo-based food trading company Nishimoto Co., is intended to generate royalties for the university based on intellectual property rights it holds.
Authorities said the aim was to ensure the fruit’s availability year-round and create a strong export market. Aomori Prefecture is famous for its apples.
The deal gives Wismettac Foods breeding rights in South Africa, which benefits from ample sunshine when the northern hemisphere is in the grip of winter. This means Kimito apples will be available year-round for export to Asia and elsewhere.
Plant breeders’ rights refer to the intellectual property rights granted to the developer of any new plant variety.
Wismettac Foods will partner with a South Africa-based company to register the apple variety and an associated trademark in the country in the coming months. It will then begin growing the apple variety in the country on a trial basis.
The Kimito variety, known for its high storage capacity, was developed by the Fujisaki Farm of the College of Agriculture and Life Sciences, Hirosaki University in Fujisaki, Aomori Prefecture, and registered as a Japanese apple variety in 2016.
According to the university, the yellow-skinned Kimito apple has white flesh and a refreshing sweetness. The core of the apple is more watery than that of other, more typical yellow-skinned apple varieties, officials said.
Countless varieties of agricultural products developed in Japan have ended up outside the country’s borders without authorization and are being grown on a large scale overseas, depriving Japan of export opportunities.
The Agriculture Ministry has estimated that exporting the Shine Muscat grape to China alone causes at least 10 billion yen ($64 million) in annual losses in royalties that could have been earned otherwise.
This is why Wismettac Foods has adopted the so-called “variety club” system, which guarantees the protection of intellectual property rights on a plant variety. Members of the “club” are then entitled to receive licenses to produce and market the variety.
The system has been introduced across much of the apple-producing world – Oceania, including Australia and Europe – since the mid-2000s.
South Africa is a signatory to the International Convention for the Protection of New Varieties of Plants, also known as the UPOV Convention.
Takahiro Masuda of Wismettac Foods said the company planned to grow apples in South Africa partly because it would allow it to develop sales channels in Europe and the Middle East, to which South Africa is located closer than Japan.
“Since the seasons are the opposite of those in Japan, South African apples could be marketed in the off-season when shipments from Japan are decreasing,” Masuda says. “The ability to offer Kimito apples, which are as good as those produced in Japan, at prices that are appropriate for the market will also help us develop new sales channels.”
Wismettac Foods is also exploring the possibility of exporting Kimito apples from South Africa to Asia to cater to the large and growing middle-income class.
Japan has a reputation for producing exceptional apple varieties, but breeding work has been largely left to individuals and prefectural governments.
As a result, not enough is being done to ensure that farmers benefit from their time-consuming and costly work.
While Wismettac Foods expects to make a significant profit from the venture, it also wants to build strong relationships with plant breeders that will enable them to access funding for reinvestment.
“I hope this project will serve as a fulcrum for ‘aggressive agriculture,'” said Taishi Hayashida, assistant professor of pomology at Hirosaki University’s Faculty of Agriculture and Life Sciences, quoting a government slogan.
