農業参入企業の地域農業の維持機能に対する住民の評価と「参入企業の逆機能」

抄録

This paper elucidates some of the conditions necessary to build a collaborative relationship between an farm business enterprise and a community located in same area by examining the community’s evolving perspectives toward the enterprise. In this case, the enterprise is one which has launched a rice farming business in a mountainous area.

A collaboration between enterprises and the community that enhances collective activity is indispensable for making a rice farming business proceed smoothly and efficiently. Because rice farming has historically depended on collective activities to maintain regional resources - like irrigation facilities, roads and reservoirs - perpetuating this community-level contribution to agriculture is vital.

It is difficult for individual farmers to maintain regional resources in mountainous areas due to inefficiencies created by small landholdings, such as travel time between fields. Farmers have overcome these difficulties by means of collective action, and it would be critical for incoming enterprises to gain acceptance by the community in order to benefit from collective activities.

When an enterprise comes to a rice-growing area to launch a rice farming business, the community members evaluate the enterprise to determine if its activities would fairly contribute to pre-existing rice farming. The nature of this evaluation by the community can become a basis for negotiation and future collaboration. Unsurprisingly, a community might be anxious about intrusion into traditional farming practices by an entity that has a decidedly different operational rationality. And yet, when weighed against other alternatives for perpetuating the local resource base, communities may welcome an entity that can preserve local rice farming. As many farm communities suffering from aging and a decline in number of farmers, communities are struggling to reimagine their livelihoods. Solving this often includes the recruitment of new farmers or farm enterprises from outside the community.

Even with the shared objective of maintaining rice farming in the community, it is not always easy for enterprises and communities to collaborate with each other. Newcomer enterprises may have different work cultures and principles of behavior that may clash with local rationalities. Given these conditions, this study clarifies how a community can interact with an incoming enterprise by integrating it into the communal resource base and appraising its future capacity for absorbing local labor.

The result of this study can be summarized in four conclusions. First, a community carefully evaluates the function of the incoming farm enterprises. Second, individual community members carry out their own evaluation in light of their perspectives on farming. Third, structural changes in regional agriculture help shape a community’s evaluation. Finally, challenges emerge when enterprises create incentives that encourage farmer retirement, which undermines the collective capacity for resource management. In other words, enterprises have the best chance of preventing an overall decline in rice farming by designing their businesses in a manner that respects and encourages the continuation of collective activities in the community.