While deregulation and trade liberalization are now in progress internationally, the importation of agricultural products is also increasing rapidly in Japan. To cope with this development, there has been a trend towards the pursuit of intensive agriculture and higher value-added products in agricultural regions. In this paper, the author discusses the example of forced-grown mandarins to investigate the influence its popularity has had on the market and on agricultural areas.
Two particular points of significance of the impact of forced-grown mandarins on the market were found in Gamagoori city, Aichi Prefecture. The first is that new products were provided in the summer market in which fruits were scarcely supplied. The second was that the quality of naturally grown mandarins improved. This is due to demand for quality naturally grown mandarins as a result of competition with forced-grown mandarins which have a high quality in the September market.
In addition, the significance to agricultural areas can be summarized as follows. First, was the expansion of the basis of the labor force due to the fact that the succeeding generation of the farming family returned from their non-agricultural occupations. This was in large measure a consequence of the characteristics of forced-grown mandarins, such as higher profits, longer harvest times, higher productivity per unit area of land and tolerance of different weather regimes. The second point is the facilitation of intensive management in infacility growing. As a result, the scale of naturally grown mandarins became smaller while the planted mandarin species changed to early mandarins in expectation of the transplantation of mature trees to green houses. In addition, to improve the level of productivity, a large-scale development of in-house grown mandarin complexes was accomplished with some success. The third point is that farming establishments growing plants other than mandarins in their green houses appeared in response to the success of forced-grown mandarins.
However, from the viewpoint of the maintenance and reorganization of agricultural areas, there are two important limitations. The first is that part of the management of naturally grown mandarins was abandoned as a result of the intensive management of highly profitable forced-grown mandarins, and this led to a decline in the agricultural environment of surrounding mandarin farms due to damage by disease and harmful insects. The second point is that the continuation of growing mandarins by senior farmers has been made difficult due to the fact that producing forced-grown mandarins is more labor intensive than producing naturally grown mandarins and that considerable investment is required for the construction of proper facilities. As a result, there are some agricultural areas where forced-grown mandarin production is declining.
In conclusion, it cannot be said that the introduction of forced-grown mandarins has successfully resulted in a long-term activation of all growing areas throughout the country.
