OPINION> Commentary
Is farming destined to die out eventually?
(China Daily)
Updated: 2008-10-07 07:44

The Japanese countryside is dotted with picturesque rice paddies and farmland. But in many rural communities, agrarian work is threatened because so many farming households comprise elderly people. Some 380,000 hectares of farmland now lie fallow. This represents about 10 percent of all farmland nationwide. To raise the nation's food self-sufficiency rate, and to help preserve the natural environment, this trend must be halted.

The Japanese government is seeking to stem the tide of abandoned farmland through various measures; by lending farm plots, borrowing tracts from landowners and buying and selling land, for example. The problem is that these efforts largely target people already active in farming, and fail to deal with the true scope of the problem.

Unless there is an influx of outsiders eager to experience this lifestyle, farming operations will simply die eventually. This is being borne out by the extremely low number of children and grandchildren willing to carry on family farming traditions.

Interesting experiments in this field are under way in Yamaguchi and Shimane prefectures. The nonprofit organization Student Farming Corps, a corporate entity with its roots in student activities, dispatches young people to do farm work and draws up contracts to cultivate land, among other things.

The origins of this NPO lie in a lecture delivered some years ago at Yamaguchi University by Masaru Kataoka, an advocate of socially conscious corporate activities, on pursuing business-based resolutions for regional problems. The topic of farmer shortages arose at that time, with interested students striking out to find answers. Under Kataoka's guidance, the scope of these activities continues to expand.

At first, students interested in farming were sent to work on actual farms. To this day, the organization maintains a network through e-mail and other means of roughly 150 individuals, including retired members of the baby-boom generation, deployed to work at 60 farms for 700 yen an hour.

Next came growing instances of members consigned to look after farming operations in their entirety. Tea plantations, vineyards, mandarin orange orchards and other plots were outsourced, with Kataoka himself buying up some areas. In this way, members opted to make a career out of farming.

Support was likewise mobilized to find people willing to take over farms from families with no children. Certainly, there are plenty of young people who wish to take up farming but the resulting income is insufficient to make a decent living.

The approach taken was to first have such people learn a trade, and then take over farmland where there was no one to inherit the land, thereby creating a new breed of part-time farmers.

One example in this vein includes a farmer-carpenter whose primary income is from construction work for buildings and roads while also managing a tea plantation. Another is a video editing and IT expert who farms on the side.

In the past, family farms were often sustained by adopting an outsider as a son. Under this new program, farming is consigned to young people with desire and drive, despite being total outsiders. New succession systems of this type are vital.

The trend is not limited to students. There are increasing cases of city-bred workers yearning to leave their jobs for work in outlying provinces, as well as city dwellers determined to return to their original rural hometowns to make a fresh start. Some aspirants also come to farming from construction and other industries.

Grass-roots movements are proving effective in promoting the succession and independence of farming. But the total number of such aspiring farmers is still tiny and such attempts need to catch on nationwide.

While expansion of managed farmland has emerged as a theme in bolstering self-reliance, we cannot expect people entering agriculture from other sectors to readily handle large-scale operations from the outset. Far more realistic is the concept of tapping into the distinctive skills and talents of urbanites to forge a new part-time farming culture.

The farm ministry remains cool to the idea of having farms carried on by those from other sectors. Evidence of this is found in the long list of regulations involved in the actual acquisition of farmland. Sorely needed, therefore, is a fundamental shift in policy and direction.

The Asahi Shimbun

(China Daily 10/07/2008 page9)