High Schools Awarded for Bringing Smiles to Disaster-Hit Areas through Food and Agricultural Initiatives

The Central Union of Agricultural Co-operatives, or JA-Zenchu, announced on January 15, 2013, the award winners for its National High School Students "Minna De Egao" (all smile together) Project, in the category of collaboration with disaster-affected areas. The project is intended to commend high school students who dedicate themselves in their own agricultural activities. In the wake of the Great East Japan Earthquake of 2011, the project focused on collaborating with disaster-stricken areas in fiscal 2012 to connect the ideas and know-how of high school students in Japan with the needs and dreams of people in disaster-hit areas.

The seven winners of the JA-Zenchu President's Award include Hokkaido Iwamizawa Agricultural High School, which aimed at developing new food products in Ishinomaki as a town of history, food and tourism, and Yuki High School of Hiroshima Prefecture, which provided honeybees to facilitate interaction and help strawberry farmers in the Tohoku region.

The team at Iwamizawa Agricultural High School developed and commercialized products called "Ishinomaki Sightseeing Curry and Ishinomaki Zabai Rolls," using local ingredients from Ishinomaki, Miyagi Prefecture. For this collaboration project, the team drew on the expertise it had acquired when it developed, through academic-industrial cooperation, their "Sorachi Zabai Rolls" (named after the Italian sweet Zabaglione), which are a dessert with a new texture.

The Yuki High School team raised honeybees using the breeding technique they learned in school, and delivered the bees as pollinators to strawberry farmers in tsunami-hit Watari Town, a producer of a type of strawberry called "Sendai Ichigo," to help the farmers revive strawberry production.