Framework and Trends in Regional Agricultural Research in Southeast Asia

Abstract

Regional agricultural research can be defined as a study of agricultural development issues in a particular region, which falls at the intermediate level between the nation and the individual farmers. Actual coverage of regional agriculture often varies according to the research objective. This paper aimed at discussing the concepts of agriculture and regional agriculture, and reviewing research trends by Japanese scholars in the field of regional agricultural research in Southeast Asia.
Research results prior to 1994 could be categorized into three fields: increased food production and technology, rural poverty, and agricultural diversification and commercialization. It became clear that significant contributions were made by Japanese agricultural economists in all these fields of study in relation to agricultural development in Southeast Asia. However, there were many important issues which remained to be further studied, one of them being economic and technological research on sustainable agriculture. In the second half of the 1990s, the volume of agricultural research by Japanese scholars appeared to have greatly increased in the region, especially in the socialist countries, reflecting their open-door policy. Studies on sustainable agriculture from both natural and social science viewpoints have also increased.
The paper also took up methodological issues in regional agricultural research. In particular, two methods, village studies and field science, were discussed in detail. Village studies have been argued as a very useful method for in-depth understanding of agriculture in a particular area, but they appear to show a decreasing trend in the recent years. It was suggested that more constructive approaches could be adopted in village studies. Meantime, field science was considered to be a new direction in agricultural research, which would attempt to integrate research findings of various agricultural disciplines in a particular area. The main problem is how to integrate these results, and the paper argued for the need of a clear and common objective of agricultural development promotion, rather than individual scientific contributions, as the goal of multi-disciplinary agricultural research.