2020 Volume 76 Issue 1 Pages 98-106
Agriculture-based revitalization of rural socioeconomy in Japan has been tried throughout the country by branding agricultural products for high added value and promoting farmers’ diversification into processing and distribution, in other words, “sixth sector industrialization”. The existing method for economic evaluation of flood-control projects uses the country-wide average of their prices, regardless of the efforts for branding in each area, to estimate the damage to agricultural products due to inundation of farms. Moreover the inundation of farms can cause not only the damage to agricultural products but also indirect impacts via the sixth sector industry, threatening sustainable development and stability of the rural socioeconomy. To estimate flood-caused damages in agriculture more properly, this study proposed to modify the existing economic evaluation method of flood-control projects by considering the product branding and the sixth sector industrialization as factors characterizing current circumstances in agriculture. In its application to a flood event in Yamagata prefecture, Japan, the modified method demonstrated 15% increase of the damage to paddy fields compared to the conventional method, implying that the above factors are not negligible for economic evaluation of flood-control projects.
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