What are the project of improvement of agricultural structures based on rice crop in Saitama Prefecture ? The main results came out of the project are as follows (so far as we consider them in the light of an administrative policy re-forming those areas):
(1) Tney have given rise to the outflow of surplus labor.
(2) They have somehow lowered land-productivity, but have generally enhanced laborproductivity.
(3) The surplus labor has fled into non-agricultural works rather than into the work for the development of agriculture.
(4) They have improved farmer's encomomy by means of securing agricultural income as well as enhancing income from their side-jobs.
(5) Perhaps, these projects will not so much incur regional development of agriculture and encouragment of full-time farmers, as the differentiation of agricultural management in classes (or scales) and the disintegration of farmers themselves. Seen from the consequence, the improvement projects worked to develop suburban agriculture and to encourage part-time farmers, and countermeasures are considered to be in urgent need.
The effects of these undertakings on the areas concerned are as follows:
(1) In areas, where more crops for immediate sale or commerical crops are raised, the surplus labor has not flown out.
(2) In areas where rice farmers increased in number, the surplus labor has flown out.
(3) In areas where various sorts of crops are raised in the same way as before, the surplus labor has flown out.
The factors stipluating the re-formation of these agricultural areas are as follows:
(1) a mode of the use of land (a paddy field or a field artificially irrigated)
(2) a historical condition (especially the period and contents of agricultural class differentiation)
(3) a status quo of captial equipments (especially the spread of cultivators)
(4) a regional condition (that of urbanization and traffic)