農協(JA)出資農業生産法人 : 日本農業の構造問題と新たな担い手の歴史的地位

抄録

Japanese agriculture is now confronted with the succession of generations on a large scale, as workers born between 1926 and 1934 (in the single-digit years of the Showa era), until now the backbone of the labor force in Japanese agriculture, reach retirement age. The current outlook for the agricultural system, laying out the structural reform targets for 2015, was determined in March 2005 along with the new foundation plan for food, agriculture and rural society. The goal of nurturing ten thousand juridical person enterprises was raised therein. As one of the sources of creating these new juridical bodies, the Agricultural Production Juridical Person (APJPIC) invested by JA was for the first time officially recognised in a government document as having the role of nurturing structural reform of agriculture. APJPIC is anticipated to act as the "agricultural supporter of last resort" (Trager) in rural areas where family farms, legal entities and community supported production organizations cannot play the role of agricultural producer. It was recognized by the revised land law in 1993, although neither the Ministry for Agriculture, Forestry and Fishery nor the national union of agricultural cooperatives actively nurtured APJPIC at that time. However, with the recent dramatic increase in abandoned farmland and pressure from private enterprise for permission to enter into the utilization of farmland, since 2000 APJPIC has been keenly watched and finally agricultural policy now seeks to actively promote APJPIC. The new foundation plan for agriculture delineated the community supported production organization as a means of support for agriculture, and in certain areas such as Yamagata and Miyazaki prefectures new types of community supported production organizations were created. Thus the synchronization of activity between community supported production organizations and APJPIC has occurred in some locales. This study aims to clarify the construction process, management structure and economic performance of APJPIC, based on replies to a questionnaire carried out nationally in September 2004. Another objective is to clarify the various types of APJPIC on the basis of analysis of individual examples, and to establish the significance of these in the reorganization process of Japanese agriculture.