40 The Global Food System
the evidence suggests that few will do so. Since the late 1960s, the proportion of
farmers planning to pass their businesses to their heirs has fallen from about 75 per
cent to 48 per cent (Ward, 1993). Succession is also less likely for farmers in the
less prosperous areas (Marsden et al, 1992). Farming’s declining economic for-
tunes seems to have eroded the commitment to successors in family farming and
the prospect of a farming career appears to have become less attractive to farm
children.
Changes in Japan and the US
These changes are mirrored by social changes in other industrialized countries. In
Japan, similar threats to rural culture are occurring. More than half of farmers are
older than 60 years of age and 75 per cent are part-time, relying on jobs in manu-
facturing as their main income source. Only 16 per cent of all farms have a male
under 60 years devoting more than 150 days each year to farming (Ohnox, 1988).
Like many other parts of the world, the next generation shows little interest in the
labour-intensive work of farming: 70 per cent of farms have no successor. The
number of farm households has fallen from 5.82 million in 1960 to 4.2 million in
- In that time, the number of people living in a farming household has fallen
from some 34 million (30 per cent of the population) to just under 17 million (14
per cent of population) (Iwamoto, 1994; MAFF, passim).
One woman farmer of a 0.2ha plot on the outskirts of Tokyo says her son, who
works in an electronics factory, wants her and her 70-year-old husband to retire
and sell the land to property developers: ‘the young are not interested in the old
ways and the old values. We have always owned land, it is the foundation and
strength of our family. Our son says the land should be sold for building, or as a
car park, but we believe everyone benefits from having farmers in the heart of the
city’ (in Davies, 1992). However, many say that looking down on their tiny plots
of land from their tower blocks has helped them protect their sanity. Farmers fear
that their rice culture is under terminal threat: ‘people are lamenting the coming
extinction of the two thousand year rice culture of Japan’ (Furusawa, 1988). None-
theless, it is also true that this culture has been heavily protected by national poli-
cies.
Just as in Britain and Japan, there have been huge changes in rural culture dur-
ing this century in the US. Since 1900, the proportion of the national population
who are farm residents has fallen from 40 per cent to just 1.9 per cent, or 4.6 mil-
lion people (AAN, 1993). Family farms have been consolidated into larger farms;
labour opportunities have fallen; and farm enterprises have been concentrated in
fewer hands. This modernization has been most visible in the declining number of
farms and the replacement of family farming by modern large-scale farming. But
it has also had significant impacts on social systems.
A classic study conducted in 1946 by Walter Goldschmidt showed what hap-
pens when the social structure in the countryside changes during modernization
(Goldschmidt, 1978). He studied the two rural Californian communities of Arvin