Mechanisms of Sustaining Agriculture and the Aging of Rural Communities in Takamiya-cho, Hiroshima Prefecture

抄録

With the shortage of agricultural work force in Japan, rural villages today have to cope with the problems of aging work force. This paper aims to clarify the mechanism of agricultural continuance by means of a detailed case study in Takamiya-cho, a village in Hiroshima Prefecture. Two main work force complementing systems have been discussed in the previous studies in addition to part-time farmer. One of them is the “weekend farmer” who lives outside his home village and returns to the village to help with his family's farm in the busy farming seasons or on weekends. The other is the trust system of agricultural lands and works. This surly investigates how these two systems function in a village with an aged population. Three types of farmer can be classified according to the work force complementing situation. The first type is the successor who lives with his aged parents and works in the non-agricultural sector. Where this type of farm household is prevalent, cultivation can be continued because the agricultural work force will be reproduced even with part-time farming. In such a situation only rice will be cultivated, by a small work force using agricultural machinery. In the second type, the agricultural work force is complemented by “weekend farmers.” In this type cultivation is maintained by the work force complementing system in each farm household itself. The work force complementing of “weekend farmers” is available for mechanized agriculture, but serious problems will occur in the near future, because there is little probability of reproducing the agricultural work force. In the third type, the work force is complemented by an agricultural trust. This type is a work force complementing system that works in groups of farm households. This type of work force complementing is available not merely in villages with an aged population but also in villages where part-time farming is predominant.