抄録
Liquidization and enlargement of farmland is essential for improving productivity and reducing cost in Japanese Agriculture. Land readjustment and land replotting is one of the driving forces of land liquidization and enlargement. However, making decisions and building consensus toward farmland replotting is often a difficult task. In order to implement land rearrangement in a smooth and peaceful way, it is necessary to design a better farmland replotting mechanism. This paper aims to verify the factors and causes of conflict and to clarify the process of consensus building during the implementation of farmland replotting. We study the details of replotting in a rural community located in northern Shibata, Niigata prefecture. We first uncover farmers' intentions on land rearrangement, discuss what kinds of conflict arose during the replotting process, and reveal how such conflict was resolved. We argue that the main conflict rests on the confrontation between the preference of the plot location and the extent of grouping plots. Based on statistical analysis, we found that landowners that had original plots in better condition, in terms of shape and adjacency to main road, were more likely to get a new plot in the same location as the original. This implies that some landowner's request on plot location was acknowledged. However, this will limit the scope for grouping dispersed plots. To ease this conflict, preference on plot location for specific non-cultivators was neglected.
