戦後リンゴ生産における高収量化・高品質化メカニズムの分析

高接更新とわい化栽培を中心に

抄録

This paper analyzes the characteristics of post-war apple production in terms of high yield and high quality. This analysis uses moralischer Verschleiβ: economic obsolescence of fixed capital together with the improvement of the fixed capital turnover period. Under this limitation, producers must renew apple trees early in their useful lives, and therefore need high profitability to accumulate renewal costs quickly. As a result, they pursue high yield and high quality, and try to maintain high profitability through superior production and sales conditions. Thus, the mechanism for higher yield and higher quality is necessary. However, careful analysis calls into question whether high profitability is realized by high yield and high quality. The post-war production process “takatsugi” (grafting on the branch) makes it easy for each producer to renew apples into high quality varieties, while “dwarfing apples” causes the problem of increasing costs through facility expenses. Producers repeatedly renew to new varieties to increase profits and increase costs, and as a result, the supply of apples to the market increases with market prices decreasing. Consequently, the problem of overproduction by adjusting production in post-war apple production is not only difficult to solve, but it also has a higher cost by pursuing higher yields and higher quality in response to moralischer Verschleiβ.