1997 Fiscal Year Final Research Report Summary
The possibility of inheritance between generation of the part-time farm households and its social consequence
| Project/Area Number |
08660263
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| Research Category |
Grant-in-Aid for Scientific Research (C)
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| Allocation Type | Single-year Grants |
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| Section | 一般 |
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| Research Field |
Agro-economics
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| Research Institution | Yokohama National University |
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Principal Investigator |
TASHIRO Yoichi Yokohama National University Faculty of Economics Professor, 経済学部, 教授 (00092651)
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| Project Period (FY) |
1996 – 1997
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| Keywords | part-time farmer / generation succession / housekeeping structure / family labor valuation |
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| Research Abstract |
At Ashikari Town in the paddy plains of Saga Prefecture, many of the inheritors of part-time farm households have been changing their occupations woward more stable ones such as full-time jobs and their own independent businesses. Most of them, however, are likely to begin farming after their retirements, or when their parents gets too old to continue farming. Many of the part-time farm households seem to remainin their current status, because the size of those farms are not so large, and there are few farmer who want to enlarge their farm size.
In contrast, the situation is much different in Nishi-Tosa Village of Kochi Prefecture and in Ichinomiya Town of Hyogo Prefecture, both of which are among the less-favored erase. The households with two generations or less account for two thirds of the total households in these areas, which means a substantial collapse of the "Ie", or the traditional form of Japanese farm family system. The inheritors of those households have already moved out to urban areas relatively close to their hometown in case of Nishi-Tosa, and to distant ones in case of Ichinomiya. The possibility for these inheritors to get back to their hometowns must be extremely insecure. Among its factors are the smallness and self-sufficiency of their farms, the underdevelopment of farmers with intent to consolidate those without farming inheritors, and the lack of job opportunities available for habitants of these areas.
Some systems have been sought for in order to support the regions' agriculture, such as cooperative farming based on the rural community, agricultural public corporations funded by the local governments, and so on. However, the perspectives of these attempts are still unclear. Contrastive results of the study summarized here imply that the possibility of inheritance in part-time farm households are critically affected by the agricultural structure and he character of labor market in each area.
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