WHAT CONSTITUTES “GOODNESS†IN FARMING? FARMING AND LOCAL COMMUNITY IN NEOLIBERAL CONTEXT IN JAPAN

Abstract

Japanese agriculture has been going through a drastic change especially in terms of the number of farmers today. Modernization of agricultural structure, which had been pursued for many years by the government, seems to be suddenly realized through a large scale retirement of elder farmers. The advancing structural change in farming, especially consolidation of farming into fewer agricultural entities, raises a concern that rural community people are completely detached from farming per se. This concern leads our study to analyze the relationship between large-scale farming entities and local communities, which were once closely tied. In order to understand the nature and change of the relationship, we have focused on a Japanese farm competition and try to elucidate how the “desirability†of farms have evolved over time, and try to draw implications for the above-mentioned relationship. Our examinations of selection criteria of agricultural competitions, where advanced farmers seek to be awarded as the “best†farmers, reveal that the criteria have evolved from simpler ones to highly complex ones. More specifically, in an early era (the 1960s), farmers competing there are expected to have almost solely technical skills, whereas more recent criteria dictate that farmers should make social contribution to local communities. This indicates that goodness or “desirability†for advanced farmers has also gone through substantial changes. Farming entities are now not only to survive market competitions, but also to confront and deal with complex local demands to play roles that used to be fulfilled by local governments faced with declining budgets from the state government. The fact that Japanese cutting-edge farmers are expected to play substantial roles to sustain local communities seems to resonate with discourses extolled by neoliberalism penetrating into rural areas across the world. That is, rural actors are supposed to be entrepreneurial, efficient, and competitive in market principles, and simultaneously required to make contradictory commitments to sustain local communities.