農業の重要な担い手としての兼業従事者

今日の農業における兼業従事者の意義をめぐって

抄録

　　　In this article I place the pluriactivity farmer as an important part of Japanese agriculture in contemporary times. In the first part I survey processes of statistics of Japanese agriculture and farmers, especially agricultural census from its origin to present. I identify the change of the definition of technical terminology ; farming family and its subdivision category, full-time farming family and pluriactivity farming family. After all I find Japanese agricultural census have expected only full-time farming family and full-time farmer as the main part.
　　　In the second part I divide the members of farming family into 3 categories according to their jobholding situation : a person specialized farming, a person farming and doing the other job, a person doing the other job. I illustrate that the ratio of person farming and doing the other job is almost fixed or little increasing. When we refer to the reliance of Japanese agriculture, we can not disregard that ratio. Next I compare the working time of paddy farmers with the farmers who cultivate vegetables in forcing house. Paddy farmer’s working time is rapidly decreasing owing to machines. But the size of their field has not grown larger. So they likely spend much more time for other jobs. Vegetable farmer’s working time still keeps too much high level to take enough rest. We can understand working conditions are getting worse than former years. It is more necessary to change these situation by introducing work-sharing and accelerating multiple-activity between agriculture and the other job.
　　　In the last part I refer to the poor social security system of Japanese pluriactivity farmer. So we have to immediately make arrangements for establishing social security system not only for full-time farmers but also for pluriactivity farmers.