2021 Volume 71 Issue 4 Pages 615-634
Recent developments in the global economy and their corresponding neoliberal agricultural policies have caused serious damage to the conventional ways of parttime rice farming families and their rural communities in Japan, especially in hilly and mountainous areas. In the form of collective actions to survive the crises, farmers have initiated community-based farming（CBF）. CBF is a farming system practiced by a cooperative organization in which most family farms within a hamlet participate. By pooling all the resources such as farmland and labor force, CBF aims to reduce the financial difficulties and labor shortages of each farm as well as to sustain the farmland and milieu of the entire community. Our case study shows that CBF organizations have succeeded in both tasks through the efforts of the competent senior core members who engaged in full-time farming after retiring from their off-farm jobs. However, ironically, the successes have led to a marked decrease in participation of the rest of the CBF members and their younger families in farming and community activities. Being uncertain about CBFʼs long-term viability, the core members have begun to rebuild the original management and recruitment system. The implementation of CBF has irreversibly accelerated the fundamental transformation of the composition and nature of farm families and rural communities. In our case study, we found that the present rural communities are constituted by four types of households: （1）the entrustment to CBF type （great majority）,（2）the conventional family farm type（minority）,（3）the newcomer non-farm type（minority）, and（4）the newcomer farmer type（very few）. The future of rural society must be envisaged on the basis of such a transformation.
