About Starvation

Last year I leaned a global environment argument by choice class and I became care of starvation. Now I work at a hotel as a part-time job. Many people come to have meetings, enjoy the party and so on. Also many people leave a lot of foods and drinks. It reminds me of the article that I read before.－’It is said that 25% of the wedding meals are thrown away. However I thought, in fact, more than 25% of meals were wasted. I saw that a lot of foods and drinks are thrown away. ‘How many people could be saved with these food?’ I thought again.

A person dies ever five seconds and thirty thousands people are dying everyday in the world. More than eight hundred million people suffer from hunger because of a population increase, war, dispute and disaster around the world. Yet, there are enough foods for everyone to live in the world. Then, why do we have this problem? It is the world problem including Japan.

As you know Japan is a developed nation but Japan imports about 60% of its food. This percentage is the most in the advanced countries. Also Japanese self-sufficient rate is only around 40%. Most crops except egg are imported from America. Every year our self-sufficient rate declines. Yet Japanese people waste over 50% of food, annually, it is said that Japan is throwing away most of all countries. An article of about NGO shows that if we eat without wastefulness, the food waste of 17% will be lost and it will be able to save 25.6 million people who suffer from starvation. I was shocked when I knew it. In Japan, about 60% of 21.89 million tons food waste, about 12.5 million tons, is raw garbage that goes out of home kitchen. We throw away a lot of food while we don’t notice.

Now, what I would like you to notice is we are blessed to live in Japan. After all, we can drink the water that comes from the faucet. I think that we should feel happy about that. There are many people who are embarrassed because of shortage of water in the world. It is said that the tap water can not be drunk in 80% of the metropolises of the world, so Japan is one of the few countries to have ‘’safe water’’ around the world.

Today I can not imagine that people are dying somewhere while we are living so. Though we should do something to decrease hunger, I don’t know what we can do yet. I’ll take international contributions and cooperation course at my university and I would like to know what we can do. However I think that the first step is to become aware of the situation. To be aware of the problem is the important think. So I would like you to know and feel something about starvation.