It was full thirty years in 1991 since the Agricultural Fundamental Law (AFL) was enacted. Japanese economy, which went into the period of high-pitched growth beginning in 1955, gave agriculture very different conditions from previous ones. Among these, the following three were given much consideration to:
i) The absolute decrease of agricultural population as a result of the constant population outflow from the rural districts caused by the rapid enlargement of non-agricultural employment.
ii) The decrease in the amount of consumption of starchy food, resulting from the change in the food consumption structure with a rapid rise in the national income level or the living standard, on the one hand, and the considerable increase in the amount of consumption of livestock products, vegetables and fruits, on the other.
iii) The enlarged income difference between the urban and the rural districts caused by the income increase of urban workers.
The AFL enacted in 1961 to orient the government policies towards the adjustment of agriculture to these conditions. It aimed especially at improving the backward structure of Japanese agriculture-the structure in which most farms were small-scaled managements of less than one hectare, where agricultural work depended generally on manual labor, resulting in the dominance of premodern lowness of productivity-and, at the same time, at encouraging many a self-supporting management, or a larger-scaled family farm in which modern technology or machinery could be adopted.
The agricultural policies have since been understood to proceed on this line and to actualize it, and called in a word“AFL Policy”. The thirty years of this policy, however, cannot have produced the improvement of agricultural structure aimed at by the Law.“The self-supporting managements”have decreased in number, and most farms become those mainly depending on side business. Agricultural production has relatively decreased and most food has become dependent on import. Now, a danger of the entire collapse of agriculture is apprehended under pressure from outside to open the rice market.
Why, then, have the AFL and its policy collapsed? One reason might be that Japanese economy has changed so more greatly and rapidly than expected at the time of its enactment that its plan soon lost its validity. The real cause lies, however, in the fact that the actual agricultural policies have for thirty years been swayed to the different direction from the provided course by the Law, or even to the opposite. It may sound paradoxical, but what has emasculated the Law has been the AFL Policy itself, which really worked as its antithesis.

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