Harvesting State Support

Agriculture has been among the toughest political battlegrounds in post-war Japan and represents an ideal case study in institutional stability and change. Inefficient land use and a rapidly aging work force have long been undermining the economic viability of the agricultural sector. Yet, vested interests in the small-scale, part-time agricultural production structure have obstructed major structural reforms. Change has instead occurred in more subtle ways. Since the mid-1990s, a gradual reform process has dismantled some of the core pillars of the post-war agricultural support and protection regime. Harvesting State Support analyses this process by shifting the analytical focus to the local level.Based on extensive qualitative field research, Hanno Jentzsch investigates how local actors, including farmers, local governments, and local agricultural cooperatives, have translated abstract policies into local practice. Using the example of farmland redistribution, Jentzsch reveals how effective the national reform process has been implemented, and in whose interests the reforms have been interpreted. Showing how these local variants are constructed through recombining national reforms with the local informal institutional environment, Harvesting State Support reveals new links between agricultural reform and other shifts in Japan's political economy.