index > Today's Earth, Our Future > 6. We love food > Where Does Our Food Come From?
 
Where Does Our Food Come From?What did you eat for dinner last night? Where do you think its ingredients came from? When talking about these details of your meals, we refer to the proportion of food that is produced in your country as a "food self-sufficiency rate." Japan, for example, imports 96 percent of all soybeans, so the self-sufficiency rate for soy is only 4 percent. On the other hand, the rate for rice--Japan's staple food--is as high as 95 percent. The rate for wheat, used to make bread and noodles, is 9 percent, and the rate for corn is almost zero percent. Very little corn is produced in Japan. What about pork? The self-sufficiency rate of pork in Japan is 55 percent. But while 55 percent of all pork on the market is produced in Japan, in fact, 90 percent of the pigs' feed is imported. This means that only 10 percent of the feed is produced in Japan. So, the true self-sufficiency rate of pork is only 5.5 percent (10% of 55%). All kinds in food, for example, rice, bread, meat, fish, vegetables and fruit can be calculated in terms of the amount of calories they produce when eaten. By calculating your food in calories, you can learn how many calories of each meal are produced in your own country. This is called a "calorie-based food self-sufficiency rate." Japan's calorie-based food self-sufficiency rate is 40 percent. This means that the availability of over half of the food Japanese people eat is dependent on imports from foreign countries. Let's look at some other countries. The food self-sufficiency rate in Germany is 96%, the United States, 125%, France, 132%, and in Australia, its as high as 280%. As you can see, the food self-sufficiency rate of many industrialized countries is more than 100%. This means that in these countries, the amount of food that is grown domestically (within that country) exceeds the amount of food domestically consumed. By contrast, Japan's self-sufficiency rate ranks as low as 128th out of the world's 175 countries. Likewise, Japan ranks 29th out of 30 developed countries and is the lowest among the nations with populations above 100 million. Lester Brown, a world-famous environmentalist says, "The era of food shortages will come in the future since the world population continues to grow while food production doesn't increase at all. As a result, you won't be able to buy food even if you have enough money, since other countries also won't be able to afford to sell their food to you." He is concerned that without making a serious effort to produce their own food, Japan could face difficulties when global food shortages begin.
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   6. We love food
   
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