This study analyses forestry cooperatives management from the viewpoint of mergers during 2000’s compare to the 1990’s studies.The reason why the study focuses on the forestry cooperatives is because the cooperatives have been facing difficulties with deteriorating business situation,even though they are expected to play a vital role in Japanese forest management.The study area,Fukushima Prefecture has one of the large forests in Japan so that the study can observe contemporary issues and challenges on forestry.Coping with the difficulties with forestry in Japan,the Japanese Government has adopted policies to urge them to merge so as to strengthen and rationalize their management and diversify their businesses while the government has been distributing subsidies as public works such as “tending practices paid by the government” to them,which have not been worked well.However,temporal recovery of domestic forest resource consumption might cause their management change,so the study focuses on what kinds of advantages and disadvantages merged/unmerged and business diversified/undiversified cooperatives have got during 2000’s.As a result,it clarifies that their businesses are diversified under the condition fit to forest resources/tenure in their territories by merged or unmerged cooperatives,and that financial problems causes the cooperatives not to merge each other because merge does not make their business base stronger.Although most of the cooperatives rely on public works as their business base,they will confront a difficulty in acquiring public works because Fukushima Prefectural office has changed a way of distributing public works from by negotiated contract to by open tendering.It indicates that forestry cooperatives in this region will weaken in terms of their management,which will cause people in Fukushima to lose important agents of forest management near the future.In other words,forestry cooperatives should take various management strategies according to their territories’ forest resources as well as human resources and market demand to sustain their management by their own.Furthermore,the government should not adopt the universal policies such as merger and business diversification toward the cooperatives.Discussions of the study will contribute the further analysis to evaluate the forest management issues such as aging of forest owners,forest land owners living outside villages,smallholdings among others from mergers of the forestry cooperatives.