Harvesting State Support: Institutional Change and Local Agency in Japanese Agriculture by Hanno Jentzsch

Abstract

Reviewed by: Harvesting State Support: Institutional Change and Local Agency in Japanese Agriculture by Hanno Jentzsch Kae Sekine (bio) Harvesting State Support: Institutional Change and Local Agency in Japanese Agriculture . By Hanno Jentzsch. University of Toronto Press, 2021. xiv, 268 pages. CAD $70.00. Drawing from his exhaustive fieldwork in rural and semiurban Japan for several years, Hanno Jentzsch argues that local agency negotiated and translated national institutional change in the agricultural sector into local practice based on neoinstitutionalist theory and political economy. The backdrop to his book Harvesting State Support is the process of national agricultural reform since the mid-1990s—including market liberalization, the government's withdrawal from market interventionist policies, deregulation, and structural reform—induced by Japan joining the World Trade Organization (WTO). Employing the case of the municipality of Hikawa in Shimane Prefecture, as well as a number of others, Jentzsch invites the reader to discover the processes of farmland consolidation led by national regulatory change and how local actors, such as farmers, local agricultural cooperatives called JA (Japan Agricultural Cooperatives), local administrations, and emerging agribusinesses responded to the change by mobilizing local institutions. The farm consolidation policy was designed to let small-scale [End Page 154] family farmers, often part-time and aging, release their farmlands and to allow emerging, large professional corporate farms, the so-called "bearer farms" which were expected to become more competitive in the international market, to acquire and accumulate these farmlands. However, the author reveals that the results of this policy were heterogeneous among different agricultural localities; while municipalities such as Hikawa achieved a high rate of farmland consolidation, other municipalities had lower levels of consolidation. Based on his case studies, the author points out that village institutions, such as local social ties, norms, and practices in agricultural production and farmland use, significantly influenced farmland exchange and the establishment of hamlet-based collective farms, and therefore the interpretation of national regulatory framework in local practices. Jentzsch found that in some localities where the geographical boundaries of the local JA and local administration correspond with each other, village institutions successfully contributed to consolidating farmland under new macroagricultural reform while protecting the vested interests of local actors. But in localities where these boundaries had been disrupted—by the merger of local JAs from the 1990s induced by financial liberalization and of local municipalities caused by fiscal decentralization from the 2000s—village institutions could not be successfully mobilized in response to national agricultural reform. This book consists of five parts that include 13 chapters. Part 1, "Institutional Change in Japan's Agricultural Sector" (chapters 1–3), is the introduction while part 2, "Japan's Agricultural Support and Protection over Time" (chapters 4–5), illustrates the evolution of Japan's agricultural policies from the postwar period to the second administration of Abe Shinzō that ended in 2020. Part 3, "Local Agricultural Regimes and Village Institutions" (chapters 6–7), explains the significance of local agricultural regimes, local institutional actors, and village institutions that implemented and translated national agricultural reform into local processes in more or less organized ways from the mid-1990s. Part 4, "Village Institutions as Dynamic Resources: Local Renegotiation of Agricultural Support and Protection" (chapters 8–11), provides fine-grained analyses on how the integration of village institutions into local agricultural regimes brought local variations in farmland consolidation, in the roles of entrepreneurial farms and hamlet-based collective farms in local agricultural regimes, and in the impact of boundary changes of JAs and municipalities on the ability of village institutions to effectively respond to the liberalization of the national agricultural regime. Part 5, "Conclusions" (chapters 12–13), summarizes the findings of the study. Jentzsch outlines the implications for the trajectory of Japan's agricultural support and its protection regime. Further, he sketches his own theoretical contribution that emphasizes the effectiveness of local perspectives and insights regarding informal institutions to uncover [End Page 155] the dynamics of local institutional actors in translating macroinstitutional arrangements and to refine the meso-theory of institutional change. The significance of this book is threefold. First, Jentzsch makes Japanese agricultural and rural politics and local realities available to international scholars who can neither access the Japanese literature nor conduct...