The Modernization of Common Lands and its Impact upon Forest Management

Abstract

The purpose of this study is to identify the nature of forest management in common lands. In post-war Japan, a significant expansion in the area of conifer plantations has taken place and today these account for half of Japan's total forest area. However, many of the plantations now suffer from complete or partial neglect, which leads not only to their commercial devaluation, but also to environmental degradation. Common lands share a similar problem.Villagers previously used common lands as a source of green manure, charcoal and firewood. At the same time, they planted timber trees for harvesting and sale when they needed money. Plantations were especially expanded during the 1950s and 60s when the demand for green manure, charcoal and firewood diminished and timber could be sold at a high price. In addition, in order to promote timber plantations in common lands, in 1966 the Japanese government established an Act for the Modernization of Common Lands. This Act aimed to make common lands more productive by disbanding their pre-modern and obscure ownership system and by introducing a clear and modern system. As a result of the implementation of the Act, the common lands have usually been divided among villagers or transferred to forest producer cooperatives (seisan-shinrinkumiai) whose members are usually the same villagers with former access rights to them. However, even now, more than one million hectares of common lands remain unmodernized.In this paper, I first undertake an overview of forest management practices in the forest producer cooperatives in Kyoto Prefecture. Then I examine the cases of cooperatives in Ujitawara and Wazuka Municipalities and investigate their forest management in detail in order to identify key influencing factors. For comparative purposes, I have also investigated the forest management of seven villages in Wazuka Municipality which leave their common lands unmodernized.The conclusions are as follows.Today, villagers cannot adequately tend common lands only through collective work which is carried out a few times a year. For adequate tending, cooperatives and villages must hire skilled forestry laborers who can properly thin or prune trees. Most cooperatives in Kyoto Prefecture, however, have insufficient funds to hire them and cannot help but neglect their forest.Nevertheless, there are some cooperatives and villages which have special income such as compensation for land uses under power transmission lines or profits from land sales for residential areas, factories, and so on. Some of these cooperatives allocate much of their income to forest tending.The forest management of cooperatives and villages is often influenced by the particular histories of plantation forestry in a region. Active cooperatives tend to be in regions where plantation forestry has been traditionally practiced and where many villagers are interested in forestry.Villagers' management of common lands has been influenced by their modernization in the following ways: some villages that were prosperous and had long traditions of plantation forestry have come to be more modernized in forest management through the establishment of cooperatives. On the other hand, many poorer villages which established cooperatives only for the clarification of property rights are experiencing difficulty with increased expenditure including corporation taxes, which might lead to further neglect of their forests.