Portal de Periódicos da CAPES

THE CHANGES AND CHARACTERISTICS OF THE RICE-PRODUCING COOPERATIVES IN THE SUBURBAN AREAS

1980; Association of Japanese Geographers; Volume: 53; Issue: 2 Linguagem: Inglês

10.4157/grj.53.93

2185-1735

Masaaki Takahashi,

Agriculture and Rural Development Research

The recent changes in rice production in Japan is remarkable. The family labor operation as the traditional unit of agricultural production system is fundamentally changed, and the rice-producing cooperative is now widely spread throughout the country. And this tendency seems to increase more and more in the future. In this paper, the present writer intends to clarify the trends of rice production by analyzing the programs of rice-producing cooperatives in the suburban areas. Since the number of farmers in the suburban areas have decreased and the number of part time farmers have increased, the number of the farmers who farm out rice production to the rice producing cooperatives have increased. The rice producing cooperatives belong to Agricultural Co operation and have the operators. But in suburban areas, the operators in the region are insufficient, so that Agricultural Cooperation has to employ them from other prefectures. The present writer pays attention to this phenomena and mainly considers the movement of the operators and their origins. As the investigation areas, Fujiidera Agricultural Coope ration and Izumiotsu Agricultural Cooperation located near Osaka city are taken, and these Cooperation are examined and compared. Fujiidera Agricultural Cooperation employs the operators from Mie prefecture. But the cost of rice production is above sales price because of the high wages of the operators. This makes the continuation of the program difficult. As compared with it, Izumiotsu Agricultural Cooperation employs the operators from Fukui prefecture where their wages are low, so that the cost gets lower and this program brings about good result. Observing this point, the present writer clarified the importance of the differences of wages among regions for the continuation of the program.