Abstract
Organic agricultural production prescribes a sustainable food supply. This contributes to global human society by ensuring human health and food security, stabilizing food production, and preventing land degradation and biodiversity loss. On the other hand, the decline of rural communities and their resources is intensifying in some developed countries, increasing the importance of collective actions to manage resources and the social capital (SC) that supports these actions. Researchers have examined the relationship between SC and the diffusion of organic farming, but the results remain unclear. This study assesses the causal impact of SC accumulation on the rate of organic farming using community data on organic farming published by the Japanese government in 2023, the instrumental variable technique, and spatial regression. The results showed that SC accumulation significantly promotes the spread of organic farming; a one standard deviation change in SC is expected to increase the organic area by approximately 7 percentage points. This indicates that networking and cooperative behavior among community members and farmers is an important factor for the spread of organic farming. Further, SC’s effect is spatially heterogeneous and much larger in mountainous areas than in plain areas. To promote organic farming indirectly through SC accumulation, context-dependent policies are needed depending on a region’s topographical and socioeconomic conditions.