A Japanese ODA supported Rural Development Project in Northeast Thailand is a case of practically applying H.M. King Bhumipol's royal concept of “Sufficiency Economy” based on Buddhist concept. The Project promoted not only integrated agriculture practice but also several aspects of “Sufficiency Economy” such as community based development, staged and balanced development as well as local wisdom. By reviewing those practices, lessons learned and further issues are presented. Project lifted up living condition of farmers. Their success was shared among community members through altruistic leaders or “Learning Center” farmers. Community markets are mechanism for community to build up “Sufficiency Economy” system and incentives for farmers to continue integrated agriculture, while farmer networks are working as moral support of altruistic leaders and mechanism for sustainability.

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Liquidization and enlargement of farmland is essential for improving productivity and reducing cost in Japanese Agriculture. Land readjustment and land replotting is one of the driving forces of land liquidization and enlargement. However, making decisions and building consensus toward farmland replotting is often a difficult task. In order to implement land rearrangement in a smooth and peaceful way, it is necessary to design a better farmland replotting mechanism. This paper aims to verify the factors and causes of conflict and to clarify the process of consensus building during the implementation of farmland replotting. We study the details of replotting in a rural community located in northern Shibata, Niigata prefecture. We first uncover farmers' intentions on land rearrangement, discuss what kinds of conflict arose during the replotting process, and reveal how such conflict was resolved. We argue that the main conflict rests on the confrontation between the preference of the plot location and the extent of grouping plots. Based on statistical analysis, we found that landowners that had original plots in better condition, in terms of shape and adjacency to main road, were more likely to get a new plot in the same location as the original. This implies that some landowner's request on plot location was acknowledged. However, this will limit the scope for grouping dispersed plots. To ease this conflict, preference on plot location for specific non-cultivators was neglected.

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Irrigation and drainage canals serve not only as agricultural infrastructure for paddy fields but can also contribute to society in other ways, for example, in the reduction of damage caused by heavy rains. In recent decades, the decrease of farmers and the increase of non-farmers in suburban areas have made it difficult for rural communities to maintain the canals properly. Therefore, there is growing awareness that in order to deal with this problem it is necessary to ask for newly participation in the canal maintenance by non-farmers. This study aimed to clarify the factors affecting residents' participation in the maintenance of the canals. The survey by questionnaire was conducted on 2990 residents in Fukusaki town, Hyogo Prefecture (valid responses: 1109). The independent variables were composed of not only the residents' attributes and consciousness and the regional characteristics, but also the styles of the irrigation water management and the canal maintenance (the latter of which have seldom been taken into account in previous studies). The dependent variable was the rate of the residents' participation in the canal maintenance conducted by the community. From the results of factor analysis and stepwise multiple regression analysis, it was revealed that the presence of large-scale farmlands (a regional characteristic) was the variable that had the strongest effect on the residents' participation in the canal maintenance and the specialized irrigation water management was the second. Although, it is difficult to alter the regional characteristics, we can easily modify the styles of the irrigation water management and the canal maintenance. Therefore, the improvement of the styles will be practicable option to encourage non-farmers to participate in the canal maintenance.

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