農業

The purpose of this paper is to make clear two points. The first one is the history of understandings of the environmental benefits from agriculture in Japan. In 1971 the first comment on the environmental benefits from agriculture was written in the agricultural white paper of the MAFF. After that, the content of the environmental benefit from agriculture has been gradually expanded. In parallel to this process, many studies on the categorization of environmental benefits from agriculture have been undertaken in the field of agricultural economics in Japan, but a weak point of this categorization lies in a fact that biodiversity and landscape have been paid less attention than another elements. The second one is a difinition of the concept of landscape and a categorization of agricultural environmental benefits from the viewpoint of landscape. Landscape is originally constructed of Geotop (geotope), Biotop (biotope), Anthropotop (anthropotope) and functions of these three elements. The concept of landscape is then a way to understand a space of land synthetically, and positive effects or negative effects from agricultural activities on environment are understood to appear in this space. Therefore the relationship between the regional agricultural resources which are composed of these three elements (geotope, biotope, anthropotope) and environmental effects from agriculture is very consequently understood through the integration of the concept of landscape with the agricultural economics.