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Betting on the Farm

Institutional Change in Japanese Agriculture

Kay Shimizu author Patricia L Maclachlan author

Format:Hardback

Publisher:Cornell University Press

Published:15th Mar '22

Currently unavailable, and unfortunately no date known when it will be back

Betting on the Farm cover

Japan Agricultural Cooperatives (JA), a nationwide network of farm cooperatives, is under increasing pressure to expand farmer incomes by adapting coop strategies to changing market incentives. Some coops have adapted more successfully than others. In Betting on the Farm, Patricia L. Maclachlan and Kay Shimizu attribute these differences to three sets of local variables: resource endowments and product-specific market conditions, coop leadership, and the organization of farmer-members behind new coop strategies.

Using in-depth case studies and profiles of different types of farmers, Betting on the Farm also explores the evolution of the formal and informal institutional foundations of postwar agriculture; the electoral sources of JA's influence; the interactive effects of economic liberalization and demographic pressures (an aging farm population and acute shortage of farm successors) on the propensity for change within the farm sector; and the diversification of Japan's traditional farm households and the implications for farmer ties with JA.

Patricia Maclachlan and Kay Shimizu take readers on a tour of farms across Japan to determine whether Mokumoku Farm is an outlier or the new normal in a farm economy buffeted by trade liberalization, falling rice prices, and aging farmers without successors.


Betting on the Farm examines the changing landscape of Japanese agriculture from the postwar era through the post-1990s era of reform

* Choi

ISBN: 9781501762123

Dimensions: 229mm x 152mm x 25mm

Weight: 907g

258 pages