Jiri-Rita Koushi-Ichinyo. This is a phrase in Japanese that represents Sumitomo's business philosophy. It means that achieving growth and contributing to society are businesses' inseparable missions. This has much in common with the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) and the environmental, social and governance (ESG) framework for sustainability, which aim to solve the major issues facing society while also achieving economic growth.

To realize a sustainable economy and society, not only must we act on these guiding principles, but we also need to break the status quo through innovation. A case in point is the issue of food supply. To address this global challenge as the world's population is projected to reach 10 billion by 2050, we need innovations that increase productivity and also ensure sustainability because there is an inherent limit to the expansion of arable land. Potential solutions include the development of climate change-resilient crop varieties and AI-enabled precision agriculture. In this article, I would like to focus on another solution, regenerative agriculture.

Regenerative agriculture is an approach that seeks to improve productivity while also advancing environmental sustainability, including through soil restoration, reduced greenhouse-gas emissions, and biodiversity conservation. It encompasses a variety of practices, such as no-till farming, which helps preserve living organisms in the soil and reduces soil erosion, as well as the use of cover crops. These practices are supported by technologies such as crop-protection products, fertilizers, plant breeding, and agricultural machinery.

Accelerating the adoption of regenerative agriculture will require systematically combining these underlying technologies by working across sectors—like connecting dots to form lines and then connecting the lines to form plane figures. However, progress has been slow, making it imperative to accelerate cross-sector collaboration even further.

Sumitomo Chemical Co., Ltd., where I serve as Chairman, is advancing the development of leading-edge technologies in areas where it has distinct competitive advantage, including crop protection chemicals and agricultural biological products, also called biorationals. Going forward, to further promote regenerative agriculture, we will enhance collaboration across technological fields and step up efforts to integrate underlying technologies into agricultural systems and provide innovative, comprehensive solutions.

Obviously, innovation is never easy and takes significant time. Yet even amid the difficult circumstances now confronting the world, we, businesses, must renew our commitment to meeting the challenge of solving society's major issues through innovation and at the same time driving economic growth.