Economic reform in agricultural cooperatives through business unification of unit cooperatives and prefectural federations : A case study on the prefectural economic federation in Aichi prefecture (third study on independent prefectural economic federations of cooperatives)

In 1991, the general assembly of Japan's agricultural cooperatives decided to undertake a restructuring, referred to as "Two stages for business under a two-stage federation system" .Following the decision, the prefectural federations of economic agricultural cooperatives ("prefectural cooperatives")were reorganized into 35 prefectural headquarters under the ZEN-NOH federation, leaving eight independent prefectural cooperatives whose economic activities were reformed to focus on sales in order to strengthen their prefectural functions. We previously studied independent prefectural cooperatives in Hokkaido, Kagoshima, and other prefectures. In this paper, we report the situation of the independent prefectural cooperatives in Aichi prefecture. Aichi maintains strong agriculture of mainly vegetable and flower production in the vicinity of Nagoya city. This study revealed several reasons why prefectural cooperatives in Aichi did not unite with ZEN-NOH, including the following: Aichi is near the major cities of Tokyo and Osaka, in addition to Nagoya, which consumes most of the produce of the prefecture such as rice and beef, the unit cooperatives in Aichi are very well-run; and there were no ZEN-NOH facilities in Aichi