海外ボランティア募集！大学生・高校生・社会人にオススメ。春休み夏休みも通年開催。

Food loss and waste is one of the significant issues in the world. According to the Food and Agriculture Organisation, one-third of the world's food production is thrown away every year. In Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs), there is a Goal 12: Responsible consumption and production. It relates to this issue, and improvements of food loss and waste are necessary to achieve this goal all over the world. This is because food loss and waste has a great impact on the global environment of the future. If food loss and waste continues to increase, environmental problems and food crises will become more serious. Consequently, the place where food loss and waste occurs is business and home and mainly in developed countries, including Japan.

First of all, approximately 1.3 billion tons of edible food are discarded in a year while about 800 million people in the world are suffering from hunger. The amount of food loss in Japan is about 6.12 million tons per year. It means each person throws away the amount of a rice bowl every day. Japan wastes a lot of food, even though it imports a large amount of food from foreign countries. In other words, both the world and Japan spend a lot of money and time producing and importing food, but they dispose of large amounts of food and incinerate waste using precious resources and money. Therefore, it is required to stop this negative cycle as much as possible.

Secondly, the Japanese government has enacted two laws, the "Food Loss Reduction Promotion Law" and the "Food Recycling Law", to reduce food loss and waste since 2019. Based on these laws, the target value for controlling the generation of food waste is set for each industry. Then, many companies and municipalities are working on this problem, such as food banks, food sharing. In addition, at the production factories, they try to make foods which have extended expiration dates while maintaining safety and security without using preservatives. There are a lot of endeavours to control the occurrence of food loss and recycle the food loss that has occurred.

On the other hand, not only the responsibility of the business side, but each of us has a responsibility to deal with food waste. There are many things that we can do to reduce food waste. For example, do not buy too much food, use up everything and do not leave food. If we can take these three actions, the situation will definitely change in a good way.

In conclusion, acknowledgement of this issue is increasing as part of the SDGs, and there are many improvements so far. However, immediate actions are even required to deal with food loss and waste as the number of people suffering from malnutrition increases as the population grows. Furthermore, we have to make a sustainable and better world for the next generations. It is most important to change the consciousness of each of us and change our behaviour accordingly for all goals of SDGs.