Koya Nishikawa, chairman of the Strategy Research Committee for Agriculture, Forestry and Food of the ruling Liberal Democratic Party (LDP), revealed LDP’s own draft of agricultural cooperative reforms on November 21, while the Government and the ruling parties are still continuing to adjust the reform program.
An agricultural working group of Government’s advisory panel named as the Council for Promotion of Regulatory Reform announced its proposal on agricultural reform on November 7, in which the working group recommended the administration to reduce a number of agricultural cooperatives (JAs) operating financial businesses by half in three years by transferring the businesses of small-sized JAs to Norinchukin Bank or JAs’ national financial institute.
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n the working draft, however, LDP emphasized that JAs should be provided in principle with a choice when they respectively consider whether their financial business should be transferred to the Norinchukin Bank or not. It was also proposed that numerical targets for reforming JA’s business activities, which were required by the advisory panel’s working group, should be set up by JAs’ organizations themselves.
Koya Nishikawa, LDP’s committee chairman, expressed his view that each JA should make its decision by itself on whether it transfers its financial business to the Norinchukin Bank or JAs’ prefectural credit federation, because the transfer could have a great influence on its management.
The committee chairman Nishikawa was also inclined to deny the working group’s proposal which is to abolish the consignment marketing system of ZEN-NOH (National Federation of Agricultural Cooperative Association) or JAs’ national business organization. He added that ZEN-NOH should apply a new system of purchasing some of agricultural products from farmers to sell them at its own risk since those products have long shelf lives, while the non-consignment marketing system for perishable fruits and vegetables would be too much risky.