Abstract
Agricultural land management is one of the important issues in the development of the agricultural industry in Japan. With the goal of supporting efficient land use by leading regional farmers, the Ministry of Agriculture, Forestry and Fisheries initiated a key program called the “Hito-Nouchi Plan (Farmer-Farmland Plan)” in 2012, encouraging each region to create a concrete plan that identifies which farmlands should be abandoned in the near future and who would be able to utilize them. A unique feature of this program is its emphasis on the implementation of communal dialogues to generate consensus among farmers on agricultural land use. While this program seems crucial for the autonomous governance of farmland by local farmers, the government argues that it still fails to have a strong impact on agricultural land management. Many regional plans have been developed without implementing meaningful communicative processes and, hence, lack effectiveness in actual land management. In particular, it is difficult to promote this program in mountainous regions where small-scale, inefficient agriculture is dominant and where aging and depopulation are extremely critical. What then are the difficulties involved in the implementation of communal dialogues for farmland governance by the community? This study approaches this question by examining various observations regarding the challenges of the Hito-Nouchi Plan from the aspect of consensus building and identifying concrete problems that emerged in the actual design of the communicative processes for agricultural land management. The following two points are discussed in this paper as essential aspects in the design of communal dialogues: (1) the expansion of the scope of stakeholders to include non-farmers in the region as potential candidates for future farmers and (2) the broad setting of the theme of discussion that allows various local concerns to be explored. For the sustainable development of agriculture in mountainous areas, it is crucial to design a dialogue for agricultural land management to empower community members in various possible ways.
