THE BENEFIT AND EFFICIENCY OF SERVICE ENTERPRISE IN AGRICULTURAL COOPERATIVE

为科普农业合作社的财务危机，日本推动了农业合作社的小型初级社向大型社的合并。此外，自1992年以来，预计将大规模合并初级协会，成为省一级的一个组织单位。本文首先考察了日本西部地区的三个代表性的案例，即JA Naraken、JA Kagawaken和JA Totto rikenhonbu，明确了日本农业合作社双层组织的特征和面临的问题。其次，本文以鸟取县的一个初级农业合作社为研究对象，考察了合并后的效果，主要研究结果如下：1、合并后的农业合作社中，原县一级合作社的功能如何重组。以奈良县为例，JA奈良县已经成为一个庞大的初级农业合作社，吸收了覆盖整个奈良县的县合作社的全部功能。另一方面，在香川县，尽管2000年完成了县一级的合并，但前县合作社联合会仍保留其组织和职能，本文以鸟取县为例，考察了小型合作社合并后，鸟取县农业合作社基层社的功能和作用还没有很好地进行重组和安排，以满足个体农户的需求。究其原因，是由于原县社与合作社基层社之间的联系过于复杂，难以重新分配。解决这些问题需要更多的时间。

To cope with the financial crises of agricultural cooperatives, the merger of small primary societies of agricultural cooperative has been promoted to be wide scale ones in Japan. Moreover, huge amalgamation of primary societies to be one unit of organization in the prefectural level has been projected since 1992. It means that traditional three-tiered structure of Japanese agricultural cooperatives is going to change into two-tiered structure.Firstly, we investigated three spearhead cases ; namely JA Naraken, JA Kagawaken and JA Totto rikenhonbu in the western part of Japan, to make it clear the features and facing problems of two-tiered organization of agricultural cooperatives. Secondly, we chose a primary society of agricultural cooperative in Tottori prefecture to examine the affect of amalgamation.The results of our research are summarized as follows,One of the important points is how the functions of former prefectural level cooperative are reorganized in the new amalgamated agricultural cooperative. In the case of Nara prefecture, JA Naraken had become on huge primary society of agricultural cooperative absorbing full functions of prefectural cooperatives covering whole Nara prefecture. In the case of Kagawa prefecture, on the other hand, former prefectural federations of cooperatives remain its organizations and functions nonetheless the prefectural level amalgamation has accomplished in 2000, because of two primary societies of agricultural cooperative have not joined to prefectural cooperative yet.We observed the functions and roles of primary society of agricultural cooperative in Tottori prefecture after the merger of small cooperative have not reorganized and rearranged very good enough to meet the demand of individual member farmers. The reason why is that the linkage bet ween former prefectural cooperative and the primary societies of cooperative were so complicated to reallocate. More time will be required to solve these problems.