Agriculture is one of the major emission sources of greenhouse gases (GHGs) including non-CO₂ gases and figured as a cost-effective sector for GHGs emission reduction. Japanese food supply, especially wheat and animal feed, mostly relies on imports from U.S. and Australia by long distance maritime transportation although rice, staple food of Japanese, is mostly self-sufficient. Life cycle approach would be applied for evaluating agricultural biomass utilization policy in regional level and environmental load of agricultural production in commodity level, which has advantage of allowing quantifying net environmental reduction. On the other hand, global studies of agricultural GHGs reduction potential are difficult to implement life cycle analysis because of its geographical scale.

We estimated environmental load (GHGs emission and final disposal of waste) related to food consumed in Japan and its reduction potential including some cost analysis by actions of energy use, fertilizing, biomass utilization, distribution and recycling. This country-level evaluation is implemented by aggregating commodity level or regional level estimation, and calculated cost efficiency of environmental load reduction. Scenario analysis is used to consider uncertainty of estimation conditions.