The Development of Institutional Policies for Farm Management and Farmland System

Abstract

　The objective of the report is to examine the direction of system reform for keeping Japanese agriculture alive with special reference to farmland system.

　The farmland policies in Japan are put into effect by three approaches to achieve three goals such as the conservation of environment, the development of agricultural productivity, and the rise of farmers' income. The three approaches are ensuring and conserving farmland, making efficient use of farmland, and choosing land user's course. However, before the third approach is settled, the first two approaches do not sound practical. Thus institutional policies for farm management, i.e. the "NINAITE" policies, have proven to be of increasing importance in today's farmland policies.

　We can show three issues of the institutional policies for farm management in agriculture based on land use : i.e., 1) developing new ideas of individual farm management ; 2) understanding collective production organization ; and 3) creating juridical persons.

　We propose some ideas on these issues, respectively. The idea of joint farming is introduced as an individual farm management to the first issue. As concerns the second issue, collective production organization as well as joint farming can be recognized as a main business organization in agriculture based on land use. Associated with the third issue, we need to give an inherent economic unit of agriculture based on land use an inherent juridical person and carry out advantageous and supporting policies for the juridical person.