SUCCESSES AND CHALLENGES OF COMMUNITY-BASED FARMING AND THEIR INTERRELATIONSHIP WITH SIGNIFICANT CHANGES IN FARM FAMILIES AND RURAL COMMUNITIES

Abstract

Japan has seen a significant development in community-based farming (CBF), particularly in part-time rice farming areas. CBF is a farming system that is performed by a cooperative organization composed of farm households within a traditional rural community aiming to secure efficient and economical management by pooling all the resources.  How and why could CBF have developed remarkably? What kind of successes and difficulties has CBF accomplished and faced? How do they interrelate with the changes in farm families and rural communities? To these questions, we offer plausible responses on the basis of our case study in Fukui prefecture. Our study shows that CBF has succeeded in reducing the financial difficulties and labor shortage in participant family farms, as well as sustaining the farmland and the milieu of the community as a whole. However, ironically, the successes have led to a weakening of individual family farms and to promote their dependence on CBF. And then, it has led to the fears about the long-term viability of CBF itself with generational change. At the beginning, CBF was a solution supposing the conventional ways of farm family and community. But its implementation accelerated the changes in such conventional ways and produced the need for rebuilding the original system of management and recruitment.