2021 Volume 13 Issue 2 Pages 39-48
The objective of this article is to represent four controversial arguments on organic farming, peasant, and family farming and concerning policies in contemporary society based on literature review on this field. The four arguments are the following: 1) To overcome the limits of pre-existing arguments on conventionalization and bifurcation of organic farming and pay more attention to non-economic decisive factors, it introduces the argument of good matches. 2) It reviews the arguments on coexistence of diverse agricultural models and proposes to employ the notion of confrontation among them to better analyze the rural reality. It also emphasizes the heterogeneity of agricultural policies enforced under the name of maintaining coexistence of diverse agricultural models in Japan and EU. 3) It criticizes the economically monopolized criterion adopted to evaluate faming systems, both conventional and organic, and claims the necessity to employ social and ecological criteria to redirect the trajectory of farms’ development. 4) When these three-dimensional criteria on farming systems are applied, it argues that small-scale family farming maintains the superiority to realize the sustainable society comparing to other farming systems. It concludes that discussions on agricultural policies and related researches should recognize these four controversial arguments and learning from the policy turns evolving in EU, the US, and the UN organizations.
