Abstract
Environmental degradation caused by human activities, such as climate change, deforestation, and mass extinction of living things, has reached the point where it threatens the future of humanity, and we are living in a time when we must urgently transform our society in a sustainable direction. The purpose of this paper is to look at current agricultural and food distribution issues from a historical perspective, and to emphasize the need for a change in a sustainable direction. First, it will be summarized the history of global agricultural distribution and the development of modern agriculture （industrial agriculture）, which began with the Age of Discovery and gained momentum through the Industrial Revolution, while also touching on the slave trade. Then, we will shift our focus to Japan and examine how Japan’s agriculture and food have changed with modernization, and in what direction agricultural technology was developed, with a particular focus on the Heisei era. Based on these, we will attempt to consider how agricultural science should support agriculture in order to build a sustainable society in the future.
