Issues and Perspectives of Rice Farming

Abstract

The principles of rice policy in Japan need to change into more liberalization under the changing world economlc situation. Under these circumstances, rice farms also need to challange lowering the cost of production by means of the large-scale farming. The purpose of this paper is to shed some light on how rice farms accumulate the paddy fields collectively and reduce the farm-workers individually, in order to make more efficient use of these production resources.
Approaching this subject, we hypothesize that farmers in Japan behave interdependently, paying attention to the social relations in rural communities. It is desirable for them to act identically the same as the people close to them act. We call this mode of action the contextualism.
With this theoretical framework in mind (methodological contextualism), we clarify the development process for some forms of rice farming. The major conclusions are as follows:
1) The large-scale family farms have to accumulate the paddy fields collectively with the face-to-face contracts.
2) The group farmings stemmed from rural communities have to reduce the members, especially the small-scale family farms, with the legal contracts.