Mitsuyoshi Ando, Professor
Daizo Kojima, Associate Professor
Since the formation of the modern state, agriculture has been strongly regulated by policies. It was so regardless of capitalist countries, developing countries and former socialist countries. Why is that? Meanwhile, due to the inauguration of the WTO regime at the end of the 20th century and the full-scale progress of globalization in the food and agriculture field, State-assisted paradigm has been greatly shaken. What is the consequence of it? It is the stance of this laboratory to place these issues on the framework of the political economy as a whole while emphasizing the historical perspective. One of the feature of this laboratory is to grasp the policy from the viewpoint of the rural site. It means investigating the social and economic structure of rural areas. In our laboratory we produced many works regarding statistical farming structure by agricultural census. The second feature is to grasp the problem in the historical context, to formulate the "trajectory" in which the problem has evolved and developed. Thirdly, it is a point of view focusing on the individuality of each country / region, which emerges by interwoven weft and warp threads "structure" and "history". We will make efforts to position such problem grasping within the framework of social economy as a whole, without completing it in the limited area of "agriculture · rural area". This is an attempt to widely recognize society as a whole through a small 'window' called agricultural problem.
The basic policy of this laboratory is to clarify the "individuality" of the analysis subject through careful depiction of the problem occurring at "the worksite" from two different phases "structure" and "history". It is the ultimate goal to evaluate policies by focusing on the context of policy development process.