RETHINKING TOBACCO is a project addressing food insecurity by cutting-edge biotechnology.

By 2050, the world population will reach almost 10 billion people and demand of foods will increase by about 70% from now. Also crop-eating locust is becoming a huge problem, and food crisis will become a serious topic in near future. Innovation for growing plants and crops was always needed, however there was no effective solution towards this issue.

GRA&GREEN focused on grafting, a traditional method to improve the resilience of a plant. Until now, grafting was limited to closely related species, but we discovered a process using the tobacco plant as an intermediary to enable grafting of all types of plants.

By delivering cutting-edge biotechnology tools such as genome editing, we are developing beautiful, disease resistant varieties. This makes it possible to grow crops in environment previously considered unsuitable. This is a fantastic breakthrough for breeding plants.

By sharpening our future vision of growing many types of plants on desert, we communicated the fact that tobacco plant has the potential to ensure food security in the future. This project was exhibited at several events in Tokyo and we encouraged intuitive understanding of the grafting technology by creating interactive content.

In this way we are also looking for collaborator of our project, especially related to agriculture. For example we got real offers from countries in the Middle East which has the issue of desertification. We are planning to start PoC of our biotechnology to grow plants on their land.

We are now developing new varieties of plants in cooperation with agricultural companies. By repurposing tobacco, we took a step forward to change the future of food.