Structural analysis of CBFC which operate paddy field production: Focusing on the period of rapid increase in CBFC

Many have called for improving efficiency in Japan's paddy rice production system as it faces the aging of small-scale individual farmers and the need for cost reduction. As a solution, operations under entities called 'CBFC(Community-Based Farm Cooperatives)' have been actively promoted in recent years, with the aim of producing crops more efficiently through collaboration among farmers while curbing investments through the shared use of machinery in each community. Particularly, it is well known that numerous CBFC were established or reorganized because of a series of reforms in the country's rice polices beginning in 2004 and incentives under a government program designed to stabilize income of persons and entities engaged in paddy and/or upland farming starting in 2007. It has also been noted, however, that many of the CBFC that sprang up in the years from 2006 to 2008 were hastily created to meet the requirements to benefit from these policies and program (researchers say that at some of these entities costs, sales income, etc. were calculated for each member separately, without centralizing their accounts). This report focuses on this period of rapid increase in the number of such entities and, based on a reclassification of individual data from a government survey, clarified, from the viewpoint of structure, the differences in nature between CBFC that had already been operating before the introduction of the farming income stabilization program (FISP) and new entities founded or reorganized in the said period. In particular, the report took into account the structural differences between the regions where many CBFC had been established earlier on, such as Hokuriku and San'in, and the regions where many entities were quickly set up or reorganized in the period in question, such as Tohoku, Kanto-Tosan, and Kyushu, and looked at how many certified farmers those entities included, the percentage of farmers participating in these entities, and the percentage of entities that had members mainly engaged in farming. By doing this, the report shed light on the fact that newly established or reorganized entities had a lower tendency to engage the entire community in farming operations-that is to say, in nature they tended to comprise individual farming operations simply grouped together. The statistical analysis also reveals that the farmland consolidation rate of new or reorganized entities is higher in Kyushu, Tohoku, Kanto-Tosan. Moreover, this report hopes to be the primary document of support measures towards the development of entities maintenance.