ODA, Japan – Masaaki Yoshihira is as determined to save this village of 450 people, nestled in the mountains behind Hiroshima on Japan’s southern coast, as he is the farming on which it has depended for time immemorial.
Yoshihira heads the Oda village farm co-operative, set up 10 years ago to try to stem the flight of young people to the cities in search of work, and with them the looming collapse of agriculture. Indeed, a survey of the village’s remaining farmers found that only 64% of them thought they could continue farming. A good deal of the village’s 103 hectares of arable land was lying fallow and unused. Everyone realized something drastic needed to be done.
That something drastic was for every one of the then-213 households, and 600 people, of whom 159 were farmers, to pool their land into a co-operative. The co-operative, headed by Yoshihira, now employs 48 people in all branches of the business, and after a decade the village has a tidy and prosperous appearance. The co-operative farm is profitable. Land contributors get rent for their holdings, the staff get paid and the annual payout from the co-operative is about $4,000 a year to each of what is now a community of 154 households. That is not a fortune or even a living income by Japanese or other First World standards, but in the case of Oda it does seem to have begun to reverse the trend of flight from the village. A high proportion of the people working in the farm co-operative are under 50 years old and, much to Yoshihira’s delight, several much younger people have been drawn back from cities to live and work in the village.
Yoshihira’s hope is that the co-operative will become a public corporation, bringing investment to further improve the land and its produce.
