Agriculture, Peasantry and Poverty in Turkey in the Neo-liberal Age

7/27/2019 Agriculture, Peasantry and Poverty in Turkey in the Neo-liberal Age

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Agriculture, peasantry

and poverty in Turkeyin the neo-liberal age

Murat ztrk


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Agriculture, peasantry and poverty in

Turkey in the neo-liberal age


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Agriculture, peasantry

and povertyin Turkey

in the neo-liberal age

Murat ztrk

Wageningen Academic

P u b l i s h e r s


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ISBN: 978-90-8686-192-7

e-ISBN: 978-90-8686-748-6

DOI: 10.3920/978-90-8686-748-6

Cover photo:

Village in West Anatolia

by Zeynep stnipek

First published, 2012

Wageningen Academic Publishers

Te Netherlands, 2012

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Agriculture, peasantry and poverty in Turkey in the neo-liberal age 7

Table o contents

List o tables 8List o textboxes 11List o appendices 11

Foreword 13Preace 29

Chapter 1. Introduction 31

Part I Trends in Turkish agriculture since 1980

Chapter 2. Te agrarian question 45Chapter 3. Te development o urkish agriculture until 1980 59Chapter 4. Developments in the structure o agriculture in

urkey since 1980 67Chapter 5. Agricultural policies, market conditions and transers 89Chapter 6. Conclusions 121

Part II Neo-liberalism, rural lie and poverty in Turkey todayChapter 7. Sociological approaches to recent developments in

agriculture and rural urkey 129Chapter 8. Village loss, village urbanisation and villages as

shelters or the weak 139Chapter 9. Te neo-liberal approach to poverty 165Chapter 10. urkeys experience 179Chapter 11. Conclusions on agriculture, rural lie and poverty in

urkey during the age o neo-liberalism 205

Reerences 217Appendices 227


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8 Agriculture, peasantry and poverty in Turkey in the neo-liberal age

4.1. Number and land-share o agricultural enterprises byholding size in 1938. 76

4.2. Proportions o number and land-share o agriculturalenterprises by size during 1950-2006. 77

4.3. Proportions o number and land share o agriculturalenterprises by size between 1963-2006. 78

4.4. Proportions o number and land share o enterprisesarming own land by size during 1991-2006. 80

4.5. Proportions o arming types practiced, by enterprise size in

2001. 814.6. Proportion o cultivated eld crops and orchards to total

agricultural land, by enterprise size during 1991-2006. 844.7. Proportion o enterprises and amount o land cultivated

using tractors, by enterprise size in 2001. 854.8. Ownership proportions o enterprises using tractors or

enterprises and amount o land cultivated in 2001. 87

5.1. Agricultural terms o trade in the world and urkey during

1968-1998. 955.2. Agricultural supports during 1998-2002 in million USD. 965.3. State agricultural budget realisation during 2002-2009 in

million L. 995.4. Agriculture sector credits during 2003-2009 in L. 1005.5. Proportions o crop and animal production 1015.6. Number o sites with ertiliser applications in 2001. 1035.7. Fertiliser and pesticide usage during 2003-2007 in metric tons. 1035.8. State Hydraulic Works investment spending during 1999-

2008 in million L. 108

5.9. Numbers o people actively employed in agriculture coveredby social security during 1984-2004. 109

5.10. Indices or agriculture GDP, rural population, and per capitaagriculture and national GDP during 1927-2010 by indexperiod. 117

5.11. Indices or agriculture GDP, rural population, and per capitaagriculture and national GDP during 1927-2010 (by indexperiod or annual changes and averages). 118

List o tables


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8.1. Rural and urban population during 1927-2010. 1408.2. Migration by place o settlement (rural and urban) during

1975-2000 in thousands. 1418.3. Employment status (%) and sector by gender in 2005. 1468.4. Distribution o rural employment (aged 15+) by agricultural

and non-agricultural activities, 1989-2009 in thousands. 1498.5. Rural and urban population during 2007-2010. 1508.6. Work status o rural employed (aged 15+) as a proportion

(%) o total rural employed, 1989-2009. 151

8.7. Employment status numbers, and proportions by sector andlocation type in 2005. 153

8.8. Labour orce employed in agriculture by location typeduring 2007-2010. 155

8.9. Population out o the labour orce by causes and locationtype in 2005. 156

8.10. Population o over 60 age group by location type in 2007 and2010 in millions. 157

8.11. Numbers and increases o rural households active in

agriculture and non-agriculture in 1980, 1991 and 2001 inthousands. 1588.12. Population growth (annual average) rate by location type

during 1990-2000 and 2000-2008 in thousands. 1608.13. Rural district population change during 1990-2000 and

2000-2008. 1608.14. Number o villages and village populations by village size as

proportions during 1980-2008. 162

9.1. Regional reduction in proportion o people living in

(extreme) poverty ($1.25 a day, PPP) during 1990-2005. 1679.2. Growth, (extreme) poverty and inequality during 1995-2007

in selected countries. 1689.3. Regional (extreme) poverty headcount, by ratio o

population at $1.25 and $2 a day in 2005 (PPP). 1709.4. Average annual real income increase, OECD households

during the mid 1980s-1990s and mid1990s-2000s, orderedby lowest income group. 177


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10.1. Change in GDP and per capita GDP during 1980-2010. 18110.2. Change in employment during 1980-2010. 18110.3. GDP and unemployment rates during 2000-2010. 182

10.4. Income distribution as share o national income, byhousehold income group. 184

10.5. Individual poverty rate (national), by purchase base povertyline during 2002-2009. 185

10.6. Individual poverty rate (rural), by purchase base poverty lineduring 2002-2009. 186

10.7. Poverty rates by sector. 19210.8. Share o taxation, social insurance contributions and public

social expenditure by GDP. 200


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3.1. Agriculture in urkey. 604.1. urkeys agricultural census. 717.1. Te village and rural structure in urkey. 1339.1. Forms o exclusion. 17510.1. Kurds and the Southeast. 18810.2. From rotation poverty to permanent poverty. 194

List o textboxes

List o appendices

1. Elevation and topograpic map o urkey 2272. Map o ecological zones in urkey 2283. Drought and soil degredation map o urkey 2294. Map o agricultural product production in urkey 2305. Map o agricultural zones in urkey 231


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Foreword

Andy Hilton

By way o providing a context or this work, some thoughts and explanationsare provided here regarding the background to the subject mater. First, aconsideration o the term peasantry is oered, as its signicance cannotbe assumed as unproblematic. Essentially, a dual analysis is suggested onarrow and wide meanings, the latter o which is invoked in contemporarydiscussion. Tere then ollows a historical narrative ocusing on the ruralissue in urkey. Te place o the village and the peasantry in the states

desire to shape the country and promote its ideal o rural developmentcontextualises the later unolding o government policies as recountedin this book, coupled with the more immediate actor o the onset omigration rom the countryside to the cities. Next, some o the issuesaround the introduction o neo-liberal policies to the agricultural sectorin urkey are mentioned. Important here are the inheritance o stateinvolvement and the particular conuence o events and processes withwhich neo-liberalism was introduced into agriculture in urkey. Finally, anote is added in respect to the impact o neo-liberal policies, with mention

o eects in developing countries in the context o the issues addressed.

The peasantry

Te historical development o agriculture might be characterised bysocio-economic stages o settlement (with village based arable arming),eudalism (with ormalised ownership o land), and capitalisation (linkedto industrialism). Te peasantry is generally associated with the secondo these, associated with terms like ser as synonym and lord, noble

and suchlike in terms o property and social relations, attendant uponwhat may be reerred to as the decommonising o the natural resourceo land. For this reason the concept o peasantry is widely regarded asredundant now in the developed world, let alone in those non-developed(developing or undeveloped) territories where eudal type arrangementsnever have prevailed. Te word peasant is a relic rom the past, that is,let over rom o a previous (agricultural) era, and reerring to the periodo eudal arrangements on the path to modernity, a rather specic (socio-political) orm characterising a largely Eurocentric model o (universal,

unilinear) development (along with a pejorative undertone reerencing the


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pre-modern lack o universal education, surage and human rights thepeasant, that is, as uncultured, unworthy and undamentally backward).

Previously, the material homogeneity o the peasantry as a socio-economically dened category o people has enabled its conceptualisationas a class. In European socio-economic analysis, it was the underlyingdynamics structuring this class in the context o capitalist developmentthat gave rise to what became ormulated as the agrarian question.Presenting various types o problem as claried by Kautsky, the peasantrywas nevertheless susceptible to a Hegelian specication in terms o classconsciousness. Ater all, peasant insurrections had dotted, i not exactlylittered the pages o history in Europe at least since the technological

development and accumulation o capital that saw the development oeudalism and statehood. Not by coincidence was the Medieval IndustrialRevolution, as it is sometimes termed, accompanied by, among others,the Peasant Revolt in early ourteenth century Flanders, and the laterIndustrial Revolution by the 1831 English Peasants Revolt, when Wat ylerdemanded that there should be... no serdom (Oman 1906: 201). Equally,the emerging proletariat o industrialized Europe interacted with othertraditions o resistance to help an the ames o discontent internationally,such as in the late nineteenth century Jun Mountain Peasant Rising in the

Yangtze delta region o (still eudal) China (Le Mons Walker 2003).

Tis history o resistance is invoked in contemporary usage o the categorypeasant, in which the possibility o a continued class consciousness ispremised upon (the ambiguity o) a loose delineation o peasants: thosepeople o ew means who subsist by working the land. Tis is an expandedconcept, suggesting no more than small scale, typically amily and/orcommunity (village) based operations, which o itsel neither iners eudalstructure nor even necessarily precludes modern arming conditions.Clearly, the term peasant has come to be the subject o some equivocation,

with small scale arming at its denitional core, but shiting in meaningbetween the narrow the original or archetypal (o arming olk in theeudal context) and the broad with a range that encompasses extremeso, on the one hand, subsistence armers in basic, settled (non-nomadic)conditions irrespective o the wider socio-political structure (i.e. in non-or pre-eudal contexts), and on the other, those with a lack o access tosucient means or signicant capital acquisition (or interest in aimingor this) even though they might employ the latest technology or highlyspecialised production (i.e. in the context o advanced post-eudal

economies). In other words, according to this wider denition, peasants


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might be ound anywhere, in all lands at all stages o development andvirtually any type o political arrangement.

Clearly, this denitional broadening o the peasantry results in a ragmentedcategory ar beyond the old complications o sub-classes like the Medievalreemen, villeins and cottars or the subsequent development o pettybourgeois types o agrarian labour relations. And the picture is yet urthermuddled nowadays by a host o recent developments in capital access andenterprise culture (with subsistence armers in non-developed contexts,or example, co-developing the products o advanced biotechnology) andvarious new orms o intervention (such as the market guarantees or thoselocal armers involved in school eeding programmes), as well as the post-

modern advances o agricultural ludditery, i it may be named thus (withsmall armers in the West employing organic, permaculture, slow ood,etc. approaches that may decry both technological aids and/or productspecialisation). Te amalgam as peasants o those rom the poorest (leastdeveloped) territories with those rom the richest (most advanced) mayappear problematic. Against this, however, is posited a shared conditiono all small scale armers as determined by material relations, by virtueo their position, that is, in labour as opposed to capital. Simply, whilepeasants o old were indentured to their local lord, now they are beholden

to international market orces.

Tus it is that some writers on agricultural development, rural sociologyand the like are motivated to employ the concept o the peasantry in thecontemporary context, nding commonality as it does in the global situationo smallholders today in their struggle with the orces o the corporate oodmachine, and indicating the social space or a political agenda advocatingor dierent orms o development, with alternative relationships to theland, arming and ood (McMichael 2005). Others, however, draw anopposite conclusion, interpreting this as a denial o political economy,

ones that identies the people o the land as (i) the internationalproletariat, in a vacuous generalisation, that is, o arming populationseverywhere, and when actually it is in the very nature o the operationo capital to disassemble and disunite (Bernstein 2008). Ultimately, oneimagines, the issue may be settled by the relative dynamism o the materialorces at play in the generative entrenchment (Wimsatt 1983) constitutedby the present revivication o peasantry. Te entrenchment o the oldcategory o peasantry here takes the generative orm o a reclamationby national and international movements seeking to develop a new ront

against various modernising orces that tend towards increased scales o


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production, and one that can extend even to contemporary conditionso high as well as low development (and thus anything in between). Acontemporary class consciousness, in act. Te success o the present

revivication o peasantry or new peasantry (Van der Ploeg 2008) couldyet come to depend more on its expression in action than academic debate,on the longevity and vitality o organisations like Via Campesina, MS andits anti-capitalist brethren in the alter globalist movement.

Te current construction o the peasantry as a class is not really verydierent in the urkish situation to that elsewhere, at least in other (higherlevel) developing countries. Its employment in this book should not betaken as a clarion call to arms, however, but rather as an observation o

enduring realities, both analytical and material. Murat reerences theissue rather than takes sides. Indeed, he specically observes a lack oclass consciousness among the urkish peasantry today, and without anyemphasis or interpretation. In this sense his analysis is scientic ratherthan political. Nevertheless, there clearly is a political dimension to hiswork, and it seems to be precisely the issue o the peasantry that is key tothis. Looking at the listing o agriculture, peasantry and poverty as givenin the title, it is the second o the three that seems to hold the triple subjecttogether. Te peasantry is the common denominator linking agriculture

to poverty.

Turkeys rural issue

Primarily comprising the peninsular o Anatolia, the airly large, rathermountainous country o urkey is blessed with a long coast. Teconventional division o the nation is made on a longitudinal axis, with apoor, traditional, rugged East compared to the European oriented West,but a seaboard/interior division is just as valid. While the heartland tends

to be dry and dotted with small, the generally more developed coastal areahas oered opportunities or international movements o goods (trade)and people (culture) since time immemorial. oday, this is augmented by or takes the modern orm o tourism. urkeys western (Aegean) andsouthern (Mediterranean) resorts in particular have become internationalholiday resorts, while the northern coastline is also popular domestically.Te tourism phenomenon is such that population gures or the topcountrys holiday destinations like Antalya or Bodrum are commonlygiven in two orms, the ocial (year round, out o season) residence

and the mostly temporary summer number, when the local populations


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are doubled, trebled and more by the inux o holiday makers and theirassociated service sector workers. More interestingly perhaps though,description o the countrys inland villages has begun to ollow a similar

ormat. Increasingly, ater years o urban migration and rural depopulation,people are returning to their villages, to visit, organize their amily propertyand re-establish community during the summer months beore returningback to their everyday lives in the city. Teir native settlements becomeknown, sometimes ironically, as summer or holiday villages (yazlk,yayla, tatil ky). Tis is just one o the phenomena observable in urkishrural lie today. Indeed, it is one o the ways in which agriculture can nolonger be assumed to dene the village through the peasantry in terms opoverty.

Historically, the village was the heart o the country, eted by nationalistsduring the early days o the republic. Whereas the Ottomans had beenassociated with Rumelia (the Balkan and west Anatolian heart o the empirecentred on Istanbul), and with the cultured urban elites who could readand write the Ottoman Persian-Arabic usion, the new nation state centredin Ankara, in the middle o Anatolia, espoused a peoples democracy ourkic culture, which included the mythologisation o a central Asianheritage, the institution o the olk traditions o the people, adoption o

the vernacular (urkish) as the ocial language and esteem or villagelie. Much o this remains in place even today. urkey is still renownedor the genuinely live and populist tradition o its regional olk dancing,or example, and most urks believe they come rom Ural-Altaic stock(although genetically this only about 20% true). Te village as cornerstoneo culture, however, was rapidly problematised.

In 1924, a ew months ater the victory o Ataturks orces and the signingo the reaty o Lausanne, which ormerly ended the Ottoman Empire andbrought the Republic o urkey into existence, Law no. 442, the Village

Law (Ky Kanunu) was passed. Tis established an administrative systemor the ormal political arrangement o rural lie, and listed requirementsrelated to things like water and drainage, including construction o aschool and a mosque, and enorceable through nancial penalties. Evenater the Second World War, however, the law was not only still largelyignored, but ound to be remarkable or it irrelevance (Stirling 1950:271). Indeed, the overwhelming majority o villagers remained illiterate,marriage ceremonies did not generally ollow the civil code and therewas no cadastral register, with the local records o land deeds typically

incomplete and out o date. Villages were amorphous, with little ormal


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organisation o any kind. Rural enterprise was amily based and socialorganisation widely (ethno-religiously) sectarian or clan oriented. Tus,although tax arming was largely a thing o the past, by all other standards

the peasantry was very much in existence, and represented what was easilythe largest population block in the country.

It was in order to tackle this Kemalist version o the agrarian problemthat a national system o village institutes was established under a legalramework constructed rom the late 1930s to early 40s. Directed towardsthe production o teachers or village primary schools, the village institutesystem was specically aimed at educating the rural population, but broaderaims included also a modernisation o social relations, improvements in

agriculture and reduction o poverty. Over time, however, the institutesbecame a ocus o ideological conict, and the system was closed down inthe mid 50s when the institutes were seen to be supportive o letist ideals.Assessment o the successes and ailures o this system tend to dependon political perspective. Even educationally, evaluation may either ocuson the thousands o teachers produced and village schools establishedacross the country, and the hundreds o thousands o rural children whothus received a basic level o education or else on the twenty thousandor so villages that remained without schools, only 60% attendance where

there were schools and problematic position o the teachers in the villages(as outsiders with varying levels o pedagogic quality pushing a oreigndoctrine), and a continued rural illiteracy rate, thereore, o around 80%(Weiker 1973: 266). Te signicant place o the village institute system inthe republics history o developmental planning, however, is not disputed.

Fashioning the territory, meanwhile, took various orms, includingpopulation movements and the reorganisation o settlement andadministration structures. Te establishment o modern urkey was inmany ways predicated on a national, religious based ethnic cleansing, with

Christian Armenians and Greeks escaping or removed rom and Muslimurks entering the new national space in a series o events described byterms ranging rom genocide to population exchange that involvedhundred o thousands, perhaps millions o people. Large tracts o landchanged ownership, and arming communities were lost and/or replaced,or squeezed into smaller areas. Populations were and moved around thecountry in processes o assimilation and incorporation. Muslims rom theex-Ottoman southern Balkans were placed in various specied parts othe land (where they oten ound themselves having to learn entirely new

agricultural practices), while the 1934 Settlement Act divided the country


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into zones according to political sensitivity, with Zone 1 areas (alongborders, near railways, etc.) targeted or those nearest the hegemonic idealo (Sunni Muslim) ethnic urks. Recalcitrant Kurds in the Southeast were

shited hundreds o kilometres to the west. Tus was a nation born.

Te concentration o the citizenry into ewer, larger and plannedpopulation centres was also seen as progress, as part o the passage ohistory. Intriguingly, and rather instructively, one o the stipulations o theVillage Act was or villages to have two routes that met at a crossroads.Presumably intended to mark the village centre, this evidences the veryearly desire o the political elite to determine the basic layout even o smallcommunities. In similar vein were designs made in the 1930s or model

villages (typically organised around a village centre). Indeed, the issue ohow to organize and rationalize rural communities into a better integratedsystem or more ecient administration, development and control wasa central theme o state planning during most o the republican period.Envisaged ever since the 1930s, plans to modernise the spatial rameworko the nation were never ar rom the agenda (Jongerden 2007: 122).In the early 60s, or example, exploratory research into a ull-scale ruralredevelopment was made with a costing o the resettlement o the entirerural population into settlements o 10,000 houses (and put at something

like 120 billion dollars). In 1982, the State Planning Department (DP)analysed the relationship between the state and the people in terms othe administrative distance, with a bureaucratic hierarchy descendingrom ve main centres (cities) through levels o regional, sub-regional andsmall town centres to village group centres, which were the local hubsor villages (DP 1982). Ideas were promoted during this period aimedat better integration at the lowest levels (or, expansion at the levels osmall town and village group centres), through the development o centrevillages (merkez ky), village-towns (ky-kent) and agricultural towns(tarm kent).

Mostly housing less than six hundred people, the existing stock o villagesdid not tend to be augmented by new ones created naturally through thesecond hal o the twentieth century, or be reduced by village decline anddeath or that matter records and estimates vary little in putting thenumber o villages at around 35,000. Te number o hamlets, on the otherhand, seemed to be increasing, rom around thirty thousand in 1950 toover thirty-eight thousand in 1970 and more than ty thousand by 1985.Reasons or this included the demographics o the rise in population and


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need or land along with social actors like the increased desire to liveindependently and amily euds.

More recent considerations related to the rationalisation o ruralsettlement tended to reer especially to the Kurdish issue. Te history oethno-nationalist separatism in the Kurdish dominated south-eastern parto the country has generally underscored the general narrative o nationbuilding, but with its aspect o creative destruction more evident. Teassimilationist and/or oppressive approach to minorities that tends tocharacterise nationalism has been state policy in the urkish Kurd casewith a harsh order imposed rom the centre ever since the rst rebellionsin the 1920s and 30s were put down and their leaders and amilies and

communities orcibly evacuated and resettled. Tis became particularlyclear in the decade between the mid 1990s and 2000s when the stateresponded to the success o the separatist guerrilla army o the KurdishPKK by literally clearing the countryside. In order to counter the ruralbased insurgency, the army emptied over thousand villages (evacuatingthe people and part destroying the buildings and crops), a gure expandedto more than seven thousand settlements with the inclusion o hamlets,eectively depopulating the land by a million people or more and leavingor laying to waste hundreds o thousands, millions even, o hectares o

countryside used or arable arming, grazing and orestry. During this time,preparatory research was made and schemes drawn up or a nationwiderural redevelopment, or which European Community and World Bankunding was ound but then withheld upon the realisation that in theSoutheast this support was implicitly nancing a state policy o resettlingpeople internally displaced by the military. Other return-to-village andurban resettlement reconstruction plans were developed in order to dealwith the issue, but never implemented beyond a ew pilot projects. Again,these involved a tighter administrative organisation enabled through anincrease in size and reduction in number o settlements (including the

eradication o hamlets).

In the end, the Kemalist modernising rationale in the countryside wasprobably more widely and prooundly implemented culturally throughprivately owned mass media than state education, and socially by thesea change o urbanization based on a population boom rather thangovernment approaches to spatial design. Market liberalisation policiesduring the 1980s enabled a ourishing o newspapers and televisionchannels that quickly reached people countrywide, albeit generally

constricted by a hegemonic ideology inormed by the national education


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system and general culture, and enorced by censorship. Tis may besaid to have had a relatively strong civilising eect on villagers, whoseaccess to television in particular can be dated rom this period. In terms

o demographics, population growth in the country had been slow untilWWII, and public policy directed to increasing it. Tereater, it was rapid,averaging 2.5% p.a. or the period 1945 to 1980, with the total populationdoubling during the quarter century 1950-75. Birth-rates were signicantlyhigher in rural areas, which, combined with relatively low income rates the undamental linkage between agriculture and poverty along withother actors such as improved transportation, resulted in large scalerural-to-urban migration, roughly in line with the global trend at this time.Tus, while the rural population grew by around 40% in the three decades

1950-80 (rom around teen to twenty-ve million people), the urbanpopulation quadrupled and that in the cities o ten thousand plus residentssaw a ve-old increase (rom our to twenty million) (Demir and abuk2011). Steering cultural lie and driving economic development, Istanbulwas the main magnet or this exodus rom the countryside, but all themajor cities saw exponential growth during this period, even relative tothe exponential overall rise in population. Te population o Ankara, orexample, rose by a hal in the 70s alone, a decade in which well over hala million people annually were migrating to the large cities. Large areas

o squatter development or shanty housing (gecekondu) sprang up. Masspoverty had become a dening characteristic o the new urban society.

For urkey as a relatively poor country on the borders o Europe, thelatter part o the twentieth century also saw the phenomenon o largescale emigration. People travelled to the then EEC and other Europeancountries especially to Germany on its guest worker programme asthese entered the post-war reconstruction and economic developmentperiod o the ties and sixties with a booming demand or labour. Teoutow o people to Europe primarily o the rural poor contributed to

a urther dampening o what became a very slow population increase inthe urkish countryside, especially as compared to the rocketing guresin the cities. In act, the combined migration to the cities and the Westnot only saw the number o city dwellers nationwide nally outstrippingthat o villagers during the 80s, but also the beginning o an overall declinein the countrys rural population. Nevertheless, even at the turn o themillennium, still something approaching a hal o all working people inurkey were active in the agricultural sector. And this at a time when noother developed country had proportions o the labour orce in arming


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above 10 to 20%. For all the change wrought by waves o migration, nothingcompared to the tsunami about to descend, which is the story told here.

Introducing neo-liberalism into Turkey

Because o the centralist system inherited rom the period o theestablishment and development o the republic, arming was quitestrongly supported and controlled by the state. As in many newlyindependent (oten ex-colonial) countries during the twentieth century,state involvement had established what was in some respects a commandeconomy. urkish governments had determined nancial development

in the 20s, organised economic survival during the Depression years andthen, ater WWII, structured a reasonably rapid growth. In respect o theagricultural sector, the nancial system established with national statebanks included a reormed Agriculture Bank (Zraat Bankas), whichacilitated the movement o credit in rural areas, including supports toagriculture rom the treasury, while state and semi-state run systems hadoverseen the speedy recovery o agriculture ater the turbulence o thecollapse o empire with large production rises (cotton output, or example,saw a seven old increase between 1930 and 1945).

Neo-liberal policies had been on the urkish agenda since the 1980s, butarming had largely been spared (eventually as a unction o the extensiongranted to developing nations by the Agreement on Agriculture part othe WO Uruguay Round, which gave them until 2004 to meet reductiontargets or customs duties, domestic supports and export subsidies). Atthe very end o the millennium, the government negotiated a stabilisationprogram with the IMF, which was itsel awed. A nancial crisis ollowed,peaking in December 2001. Te urkish economy was protected by IMFloans, to the tune o some twenty billion dollars, the price or which was

a new, concentrated round o neo-liberal policies, and which were nowexpanded to included the agricultural sector. As ree market orientatedreorms were suddenly catapulted into the oreront o economic policy,so too was urkish arming ung more into the new world order.

Te introduction o neo-liberalism in urkey occurred in a context that wasboth general and specic. O note in terms o the ormer, was the zeitgeisto a retrenchment o capital and capitalist values as the 70s scourge oination was deeated by monetarism (championed by Milton Freidman

over Maynard Keynes), the socialist ethos thwarted (eventually symbolised


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by the collapse o the Soviet bloc), and a resurgent right augmented byChristian conservatives (leading to a undamentalist ethic advocatingsmall government and traditional values). Politically, neo-liberalism was

no less neutral than the social liberalism it replaced. I it appears that wenow entering the beginning o the end o the era o neo-liberalism whichI think we are this is or a variety o reasons no less complex and variedand interlinked as those that ushered it in. Te coupling in this book oagriculture to poverty through the peasantry is thus entirely within thescope o neo-liberalism as the prevailing economic model or globalisation,itsel the primary socio-cultural orce o our times.

Te specic context or the introduction o neo-liberalism in urkish

agriculture concerns the particular combination o actors that cametogether. Crucially, the WO Uruguay Round process came to a head.Completions and conclusions had been reached and processes andreviews initiated in the area o market access negotiations or themaritime sector and government procurement o services (in 1996), ortelecommunications and nancial services (1997), and textiles and clothingand the harmonisation o rules o origin (1998), along with developmentsin negotiations around the issue o patenting and intellectual property(with developing countries set to meet the RIPS stipulations in 2000).

Also, it was just a ew months beore the onset o the 2001 crisis thatthe agricultural agreement commitments came into eect or developedcountries.

Important in respect o this last actor was the issue o the EuropeanUnion. In 2000, this organisation o highly developed countries was nallyimplementing the GA (WO) bargain (with up to 50% reductions madethat year in its Common Agricultural Policy export subsidies), in additionto preparing its Agenda 2000 programme or urther CAP reorm (withthe beginning o a shit in supports away rom traditional production

and towards environmental protection and rural development), andpushing or multiunctionality at the Millennium (later Doha) Round(with proposals or subsidies on the basis o non-trade concerns and tiedto programmes limiting production). At the same time as this strategicshit was taking place, urkey was entering the stage prior to accessionnegotiations, having nally received the green light rom Europe. Includedamong the preparations or enlargement announced by the HelsinkiCouncil in mid December 1999 with these ollowing an outlining ocloser integration plans, which was itsel preaced by a call or the need


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to tackle unemployment was recognition o urkey as a candidate statedestined to join the Union.

Te dream o European acceptance had long gured in the urkishpsyche initially since its previous imperial incarnation had becomedubbed Europes sick man and disregarded by the Powers, and certainlysince the establishment o the republic, when it was European modelsand conventions that were adopted or the wide range o national systemsand public institutions introduced. Tere was, thereore, no little ironyin the act that it was such a short time beore what was probably thegravest nancial crisis in the history o the republic that the Europeanclub was nally signalling the possibility o acceptance. Following the

singing o Customs Union Agreement in 1995 between urkey and theEU (which excluded agriculture and automotive sectors), the CopenhagenCriteria, toward which the urkish state had already been moving, nowassumed unparalleled importance in the countrys political and economiclie. Europe, or its part, commenced regular reports on urkeys progress.Te generally worded requirement or a unctioning market economy, thecapacity to cope with competitive pressure and market orces within theUnion and adherence to the aims o... economic... union was assessed inrespect o agriculture by the mid 1999 EU urkey report with notes on

urkish import restrictions on bovine and bee, its generally high supportand protection o the sector, and the lack o progress regarding theabolition o state involvement in marketing and processing o agriculturalproduce, ollowed by a statement o the strategy o bringing urkeys armpolicy into line with the CAP and announcement o the commencemento this (EU 1999: 32-33). It was no accident, thereore, that the World Bankstated a ew years late that urkey must continue to make improvements inits agricultural sector so as to comply with European Union requirements.1

Developments regarding the WO, WB, IMF and EU coalesced when

the nal piece o the jigsaw ell into place, the political situation at home:the Islamic AK Party swept to power in the 2002 general electionwith approaching hal o the popular vote and a commanding majorityin parliament. Te AKP government was rooted not only in the moralconservatism o the Anatolian heartland, but also in the economics oliberalization. It was also committed to EU membership, both as proo

1 Available at: http://www.worldbank.org.tr/external/deault/main?pagePK=64193027&piPK=64187937&theSitePK=361712&menuPK=64187510&searchMenuPK=64187282&theS

itePK=361712&entityID=000160016_20051122163001&searchMenuPK=64187282&theSitePK=361712.
http://www.worldbank.org.tr/external/default/main?pagePK=64193027&piPK=64187937&theSitePK=361712&menuPK=64187510&searchMenuPK=64187282&theSitePK=361712&entityID=000160016_20051122163001&searchMenuPK=64187282&theSitePK=361712http://www.worldbank.org.tr/external/default/main?pagePK=64193027&piPK=64187937&theSitePK=361712&menuPK=64187510&searchMenuPK=64187282&theSitePK=361712&entityID=000160016_20051122163001&searchMenuPK=64187282&theSitePK=361712http://www.worldbank.org.tr/external/default/main?pagePK=64193027&piPK=64187937&theSitePK=361712&menuPK=64187510&searchMenuPK=64187282&theSitePK=361712&entityID=000160016_20051122163001&searchMenuPK=64187282&theSitePK=361712http://www.worldbank.org.tr/external/default/main?pagePK=64193027&piPK=64187937&theSitePK=361712&menuPK=64187510&searchMenuPK=64187282&theSitePK=361712&entityID=000160016_20051122163001&searchMenuPK=64187282&theSitePK=361712http://www.worldbank.org.tr/external/default/main?pagePK=64193027&piPK=64187937&theSitePK=361712&menuPK=64187510&searchMenuPK=64187282&theSitePK=361712&entityID=000160016_20051122163001&searchMenuPK=64187282&theSitePK=361712http://www.worldbank.org.tr/external/default/main?pagePK=64193027&piPK=64187937&theSitePK=361712&menuPK=64187510&searchMenuPK=64187282&theSitePK=361712&entityID=000160016_20051122163001&searchMenuPK=64187282&theSitePK=361712http://www.worldbank.org.tr/external/default/main?pagePK=64193027&piPK=64187937&theSitePK=361712&menuPK=64187510&searchMenuPK=64187282&theSitePK=361712&entityID=000160016_20051122163001&searchMenuPK=64187282&theSitePK=361712http://www.worldbank.org.tr/external/default/main?pagePK=64193027&piPK=64187937&theSitePK=361712&menuPK=64187510&searchMenuPK=64187282&theSitePK=361712&entityID=000160016_20051122163001&searchMenuPK=64187282&theSitePK=361712


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o its modernising credentials and insurance against urther militaryintervention (the only previous Islamic government had been orced outo oce ater just a ew weeks in 1997 by the army in what became known

as the post-modern coup. Economic neo-liberalism was thus conrmedas the only game in town. Te republic had experienced a changing o theguard, in which a novel political situation had seen the orces o the neweconomic order propelled orward by a new social order.

Neoliberalism and development

Te intervention o the IMF in urkeys economic management can be

regarded as a urther stage in the capitalization o the national system or, the command by capital o this which had hitherto been signicantlystate bounded, with high levels o central government intervene andpublic ownership/management. As recognised by the two-tier phasing ino the WO Agriculture Agreement, arming has a special place in thestructure o developing countries. It constitutes a major part o economicactivity in the nation and is the source o subsistence or a major part othe population. Development, in the dominant model to have emerged inrecent human history, involves a reduction o this. Where state nancial

inputs into the agricultural sector are signicant (as a proportion o GDP,or example), then the drive or development as conventionally determinedcombines with the imperative o neo-liberalism to produce a conuenceo change that sweeps the nation. Not only is the countryside, primary siteo agricultural enterprise, the likely site or business consolidation, but arapid depopulation o rural areas is to be expected, with major implicationsor urban society also. At least, as Murat explains in this book, this seemsto have been the case in urkey over the last decade.

Clearly, neo-liberalism does not mean the same thing in a relatively poor

country like urkey as it does in the richer West. Rolling back the state ina developing economy does not necessarily extend to a major reduction instate welare programs. On the contrary, these tend to start rom a positiono under-development. Te tax situation is also ramed very dierently.Whereas in the West the movement away rom state intervention hasresulted in a raising o the populist cause o low taxation to the status osomething like a moral prescription and sharply circumscribing politicalpossibilities, in urkey it is the levels o tax collection that have beenproblematic (leading to the setting o high levels o underpaid tax and

resulting in the need or windall type consumer taxes, such as irregular


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Foreword

mobile phone taris). Moreover, urkey did not start rom a position oinecient heavy industry based on highly unionised, relatively expensivelabour, which has characterized the restructuring that has been taking

place in some Western (and CIS) countries. Tis is not to say that theintroduction o neo-liberalism in developing countries does not includesocial programmes being transerred away rom state provision, capitalgains taxes going unreduced and workers rights being eroded. On thecontrary, all o these have occurred in urkey, much o which Muratreers to. Nevertheless, it is developing countries that are most vulnerableto the interests o international capital, even as they enter a new age ocomparative prosperity. And starting rom the position o a prominenceo the agricultural sector, it is the rural economies that are most aected

by the transormation eected by capital, and it is the abric o village liethat is most torn and ripped apart and partially patched back together innew ways by the ending o supports and opening o markets; it is urbanmigration and the metamorphosis or death o the village that most denesthe socio-economic restructuring that occurs as a result, and it is theconsequent transormation o poverty and the peasantry that characterisesthe human dimension o this. Tese are the changes documented here orurkey.

Reerences

Bernstein, H. (2008). Who are the people o the land? Some provocative thoughts on

globalization and development, with reerence to sub-Saharan Arica. Presented

at conerence on Environments Undone: Te Political Ecology o Globalization and

Development, University o North Carolina, Chapel Hill, NC, USA, Feb 29 March

1, 2008.

DP (1982/2000).htisas Raporu. Ankara: Devlet Planlama eskilati, cited in Jongerden,

J. (2007).

Demir, K. and S. abuk (2011). rkiyede Metropoliten Kentlerin Nus Gelimi (Te

population growth o metropolitan cities in urkey). Sosyal Bilimler Enstitts Dergisi

28: 193-215.

EU (1999). 1999 Regular Report rom the Commission on urkeys Progress towards

Accession. Available at: http://ec.europa.eu/enlargement/archives/pd/key_

documents/1999/turkey_en.pd.

Jongerden, J. (2007). Te settlement issue in urkey and the Kurds: an analysis o spatial

policies, modernity and war. Leiden: Brill.
http://ec.europa.eu/enlargement/archives/pdf/key_documents/1999/turkey_en.pdfhttp://ec.europa.eu/enlargement/archives/pdf/key_documents/1999/turkey_en.pdfhttp://ec.europa.eu/enlargement/archives/pdf/key_documents/1999/turkey_en.pdfhttp://ec.europa.eu/enlargement/archives/pdf/key_documents/1999/turkey_en.pdf


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Le Mons Walker, K. (2003). Peasant insurrection in China reconsidered: a preliminary

examination o the Jun Mountain peasant rising, Nantong county, 1863. Journal o

Peasant Studies 20(4): 640-668.

McMichael, P. (2005). Global development and the corporate ood machine. In: Buttel, F.H.,and McMichael, P. (eds.)New directions in the sociology o global development, Vol. 11,

Research in Rural Sociology and Development. San Diego: Elsevier JAI, pp. 269-303.

Oman, C. (1906). Te great revolt. Oxord: Clarendon Press.

Stirling, P. (1965). urkish village. London: Weideneld and Nicolson.

Van der Ploeg, J.D. (2008). Te New Peasantries: Struggles or Autonomy and sustainability

in era o empire and globalisation. London: Earthscan.

Wimsatt, W.C. (1983), Von Baers law o development, generative entrenchment, and

scientic change. Unpublished manuscript, Department o Philosophy, Chicago:

University o Chicago, cited in McLaughlin, P. (1998). Rethinking the agrarian question:the limits o essentialism and the promise o evolutionism.Human Ecology Review 5(2):

25-39.

Weiker, W.F. (1973). Political tutelage and democracy in urkey: the ree party and its

atermath. Leiden: Brill.


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Preace

Te agrarian question had been much discussed in urkey in the 1960s and70s. Essentially, the ocus o this debate was on whether urkish agriculturestructure was semi-eudal or capitalist in character. Tose o us interestedin agriculture, rom academic or political viewpoints, caught the end othese discussions during the 1980s. Meanwhile, along with the most othe rest o the world, urkey was taking another route, that o neo-liberalglobalization. In this new context o international capitalism, the agrarianquestion took on new dimensions. It is this to which the present work isprincipally addressed.

Te study started in earnest in 2008 with a review o the old agrarian debateand historically development o urkish agriculture. Using data romthe State Statistics Institute, a rst article was produced and publishedin the urkish edition o the Monthly Review (ztrk 2010). Te coreo this comprises an enhanced version o that study. Upon completiono the initial study, it soon became clear that detailed new research wasrequired in order understand the changes that the urkish countryside hadexperienced and was still undergoing. A research project was designed and

unds secured through Kadir Has University in Istanbul, where a researchproject was established on Agricultural transormation in urkey since1980. Te completed qualitative stage o this, as well as new inormationgathered rom eldwork, is included here together with the initial ndingso the project.

Te change in agriculture and rural urkey in under neo-liberal policiesindicated another area o ocus, that o poverty. With millions o peopleleaving village lie or the city, the problem o poverty had clearly takenon new eatures. o understand urther the socio-economic impact o theeects o neo-liberalism on agriculture in short, the transormation o thepeasantry the issue o poverty, ocusing especially on urban poverty, alsoneeded to be reconsidered. Tus, as a corollary o the work on agricultureand the rural situation, a study o poverty was made. Tis was presentednamely Neo-liberal policies and poverty: eects o policy on poverty andpoverty reduction in urkey, at the rst International Conerence o SocialEconomy and Sustainability, held at Maringa University, Parana, Brazil,21-26 September 2010, a developed version o which was then published(ztrk 2011). Te nal chapters o this book are drawn rom that study.


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Joost Jongerden, Ahmet akmak and Murat okgezen read and criticizedthe drat or this work and suggested some new approaches. Metinulhaolu helped with the translation o a part o study into English. Andy

Hilton prooread the nal drat and suggested many ideas or the data,rebuilding the text and compiling the book and adding a oreword. MikeJacobs and his colleagues rom Wageningen Academic Publishers oeredurther helpul suggestions and prepared the book or publishing, I wantto thank them all or their contributions.


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Chapter 1. Introduction

Tis book represents a case study o agriculture, peasantry and povertyin the neo-liberal age. As a developing country, the case o urkeystands as an example o the paradigmatic socio-economic transitiono the present era, the modernising upheaval o a society wrenchedrom its deeply rooted, inherited agrarian base in a short space o timethrough processes o industrialisation and urbanisation acilitated bystate support o international capital transers and a globalised ree traderegime. Tere has been a seismic shit in agriculture and its place in thecountry, constituting also a transormation o the peasantry and radical

restructuring o poverty. Te present study thus ocuses on changes in andlinkages between its chosen topics o agriculture, peasantry and povertyin the urkish context, rather than detailed analysis o them individually(in which respect they are dierent research areas and already have a richliterature). Firstly, a historiographic analysis o agriculture in urkey ispresented. Te ocus here is very much on developments specic to thecurrent period o neo-liberalism. Ten, relations between agricultural andrural development are considered, along with their impact on poverty.Inevitably, the issue o poverty cannot be handled in the context o the

agricultural and rural development alone, and demands that other (urban)phenomena associated with and constitutive o the problem also beaddressed.

Te underlying dynamic o change in the three subjects as examined here isthat dened by the ramework o neo-liberalism. Neo-liberal policies havemany common characteristics, exhibited and ollowed the world over. Onthe other hand, changes in agriculture, peasantry and poverty attendantupon neo-liberal policies do also exhibit dierent particularities in dierentcountries, including those specied as generalities by developmental level.

Some changes, that is, are ubiquitous (the long-term trend away romagriculture as a primary means o subsistence, or instance, accelerated byneo-liberalism through policies like the withdrawal o direct state supportor armers); some are particular to developing countries (such as large-scale internal migration and extremely rapid urban growth, strongly linkedto the neo-liberal thrust or economic development); and some specicto the case o urkey (including details related to quite how the state hasbeen rolled back, and the specic ways in which rural lie and povertyhave altered in its various regions). Clearly, a complex eld o analysis

is indicated. It is with this in mind, thereore, that the present study


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ollows the methodology o political economics, Te nexus o agriculture,peasantry and poverty is analysed in the context o a nation (urkey) andspecic historical period (post 1980), taking arming and the equation

o armer with peasant as its starting point, along with the socio-spatialrepresentation o this in the rural, maniested especially through the villageas a place where arming communities composed o small scale operations(essentially amily-based, subsistence enterprises) live and work the land.Tis equation conceptually grounds a ocus o interest in poverty, to whichagriculture and peasantry have strong internal ties.

Processes and dynamics o physical production may be considered romthe perspective o social relations. In any such examination o relations,

both (or all) sides obviously have their own specicities. Tis is validalso or agriculture and peasantry analysis, which needs to handle theseboth separately, as two dierent items, and together, as a unitary dyad,notwithstanding the act that it is only in the recent past that they havebecome decoupled in any important way (in the non-developed territoriesthat comprise most o the world, that is). In this book, agriculture andpeasantry are viewed as distinct (albeit interconnected) entities. Tereasons or this analytical distinction are mostly related to the evolutiono the peasantry out o agriculture: rural based populations no longer live

solely or even primarily o the land, while, people living o the land nolonger necessarily live in villages. Smallholder amilies in urkey today, orexample, oten include members who are employed outside the agriculturalsector o-arm jobs, while geographical and social mobility stretches thetraditional ties o extended amily and ractures the traditional communalsolidarity o village lie (the lived reality o the peasantry as a social class).Tere is another category o people who live in towns or even large citiesbut earn (ull or part) incomes rom arming activities, mostly on amily(small plot, inherited) land but related especially to enterprise culturerather than subsistence. And again, rises in the numbers o people who live

on pensions and income supports, perhaps also with major contributionsrom migrant amily members (including rom out o the country), urthercomplicates the identication o categories like armer and peasant, oragriculture and peasantry as (single) units o analysis. It is developmentslike these that challenge traditional modes o conceptualisation and requirethe analytical separation o agriculture rom peasantry, and vice versa.

Rural populations today are no longer bound by arming or theirsubsistence as they once were. In urkey, as elsewhere in the world, the

diversication o economic activities and income sources o the traditional


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peasantry is increasingly evident, necessitated especially by changesin the globalizing economic environment. Coupled with adjustmentsto arming practices, as peasant armers entering and operating in the

local market are also increasingly orced by the commercial pressures oagribusiness to become resilient entrepreneurs unctioning as lean andexible enterprises, this dierentiation o villagers economic activities andincome sources is bringing about changes in their relationship to land, themeans o production and thus to their own specication as a social class.In a country like urkey, where the agriculture sector had been dominantuntil the very recent past (and still continues to be hugely important inthe country as a whole), this transormation constitutes a major change insocial structure. It is a transormation that includes a diversication not

only in rural peoples subsistence practices but also in property relationsand the usage o yielded incomes. Tis implies a need or these phenomenato be analysed together (with, at the same time, o course, cognisance othe dierences between them).

Te ties between poverty and agriculture and peasantry are many andvaried. For one thing, a large proportion o poor people live in rural areas(or, surplus value is primarily produced in urban contexts, or, populationcentres are also the sites o concentrations o wealth). Tis remains the

case despite the act that arming with ones own means o productionenables nutritional and housing requirements to be more easily met orthe rural poor than the urban, and even though the eects o povertyare ameliorated in rural areas through amily solidarity and communalties among neighbours. Secondly, one main source o (the charactero) poverty in a country like urkey is rural-to-urban migration (o thepeasantry, that is, rom agriculture and, oten enough, into the ranks othe city poor). Tirdly, neo-liberal policies have negative impacts on allthese areas (agriculture, peasantry and poverty), insoar as they havedestructive eects on small scale arming which increases rural poverty

while at the same time being linked to growth policies that cannot createemployment or the urbanised ex-peasantry. Tis also implies a need toconsider the historical background to the issues in question, prior, that is,to the neo-liberal period.

Te present work is divided into two parts, the rst looking at developmentsin agriculture in urkey and the second ocusing on changes to rural lie andpoverty. Each begins with a theoretical context or the review that ollows.Te rst chapter o Part I presents a prcis o conceptual rameworks and

theoretical explanations that deal with the transition rom pre-capitalist


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Chapter 1

to capitalist social ormation and analysis o subsequent (contemporary)agricultural and rural transitions. Discussion o the transormation o thepeasantry or petty commodity producer, or small scale agriculture

producer, or just smallholders rom pre-capitalist to capitalist productionrelations has been a subject much considered since the development o thecapitalist system in Europe and its diusion through the world at large.Te present work thus opens with an overview ocusing on some recentperspectives on this agrarian question, as it became ormulated.

Dierentiations o agriculture and peasantry have, o course, progressedparallel to the development o capitalism, and the agrarian questionhas been reramed accordingly. In order to understand the current

transormation in agriculture and the peasantry, thereore, one needs tolook at the contemporary characteristics o capitalism.Foremost amongthese is the integration at world scale, termed globalisation, whichincludes among its main economic characteristics the nancialisation oeconomic lie and rising instability in nancial markets, the anonymity ointernational trade, and changes in the organisation o economic activitieswith the usage o new inormation technologies and the production, supplyand sales strategies o multinational companies.

Some o the primary issues in the area(s) o agriculture and the peasantryin the process o globalisation can be listed thus: the liberalisation o the agricultural products trade; speculation dependent on the orward transaction o agricultural

products and thereore oating agricultural product prices; diminishing agricultural supports, corporate monopolisation o the

global agricultural input and ood sectors, and the eects o the thesecorporations on nourishment supply, sales and armer and consumerpractices (related to ood security and ood sovereignty);

the development o property rights on herbal genetic materials, and its

corollary, bio-piracy; declining biodiversity and environment problems generally; health concerns related to industrialised ood production; the long-term sustainability o the present system (Bernstein 2010:

102-106).

Drawing on the work o writers such as Philip McMichael and Jan Douwevan der Ploeg as well as Henry Bernstein, Chapter 2 introduces thepresent work with observations on the economic and social aspects o the


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transormation in agriculture and peasantry that have been occurring as aresult o and as a part o this global capitalist development.

Te next chapter (Chapter 3) provides a background or the urkishsituation, with a brie review o the development o agriculture in theRepublic rom its oundation ater WWI until the new era. One o themain structural characteristics o urkish agriculture has been small scaleland ownership. Inherited rom the Ottoman Empire, this basic structuredid not change so much during the main part o the period o the urkishRepublic. When the modern state o urkey was ounded, agriculture hada big share in the economy, and the urgent need in the country in thecontext o an impoverished and broken land, wracked with starvation,

disease and poverty and depopulated by war, genocides and expulsionswas or essential produce like ood and cloth. Tis shaped agriculturepolicy in the nascent state, and was undamental to its economic strategy.Public institutions ounded to buy, process and sell agriculture products,enact price support mechanisms, and deliver education in the rameworko these policies guided the development o urkish agriculture anddominated the economy up to about 1950. Tereater, industrial processesand the manuacturing sector began to become signicant, mechanisationwas introduced into agriculture, slowly at rst but gaining speed later, and

combining in the 1960s with the green revolution to lead to rises in theamount o cultivated land and levels o productivity.

Tis sets the scene or the ollowing chapters o Part I, which considerdevelopments in agriculture in urkey ater 1980, reviewing, in otherwords, the particular expression in this sector o neo-liberalism. Teneo-liberal policies applied in urkey since 1980 and especially ater 1999have had proound eects on its arming economy and village lie. Deep,structural changes have occurred that partly represent a continuationo historical development, but also indicate novel characteristics. Te

analysis o agriculture during this period presented here in order to getat this mainly employs ocial statistical data in ocusing on agriculturalenterprises (enterprise scale), mechanisation and technology, productivityemployment and the state nancing o agriculture.

Fundamental to contemporary globalizing progress has been theestablishment o international institutions and mechanisms and the(multi-)national implementation o policies in line with the approach oneo-liberalism. Te essential proposals o neo-liberal policies targeting


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Chapter 1

various macro-economic and institutional changes can be summarisedthus: removal o state price intervention in product and actor markets; liberalisation o oreign trade: abandonment o quotas and reduction

o duties; privatisation o public economic enterprises (SOEs); liberalisation o nance markets, promotion o direct oreign capital

investments and external nancial ows; extension o privatisation in social services provision (education, health,

etc.); expansion o tax base with the help o tax rate reductions; market determination o interest rates;

emphasis on competitive exchange rates; generalised deregulation o the economy; regularisation o property rights; ensured exibility o labour markets.

Tese policies were designed mostly with regard to the interests ointernational capital and, when developing nations slow to implement themcame unstuck in the new climate o globalised capital movements, wereintroduced through IMF prescription and structural adjustment programs.

Approaches developed by the World rade Organisation, it might beadded, did not contradict this ramework. In urkeys case, liberalisationwas initiated at the beginning o the 1980s, but progressed slowly duringthe 1990s when a series o weak coalition governments prevented radicaladjustment. However, a massive nancial and economic crisis at the end othe 90s enabled the IMF to dictate an extremely rapid pace o change. Tisdovetailed into urkeys ongoing integration o EU norms and the comingto power o a new, moderately Islamist (or conservative) party (the AKP),whose political ranchise was outside the old Republican elite. In otherwords, a combination o external and internal political developments and

economic events coincided to acilitate the implementation o a relativelyrapid neo-liberal restructuring in urkey during the rst decade o themillennium. From a macroeconomic perspective, it may be noted, thishas resulted in a period o strong growth and reduced national debt asmeasured by GDP, along with a large balance o payments (current account)decit and heightened vulnerability to swings in the international moneymarkets and withdrawals o corporate investments.

Historically, agricultural development has ollowed dierent paths

according to the stage o capital accumulation in combination with


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Introduction

administrative (national government) policies and international(institutional) approaches. As a undamental shit in the way agriculture isdone in the sense o the capital/labour relationship, this process inevitably

impacts on and is aected through concomitant changes in the socio-economic structures linked to agriculture and the way arming is done.Chapter 6 provides a resume o the main ndings in this respect rom PartI. Interestingly, perhaps, considering that urkey is sometimes categorisedas a newly industrialised country (NIC), small scale arming is statisticallyshown to be still a determinate characteristic o the countrys agriculture.Te question begged, thereore, is (even acknowledging that small scalearmers cultivate less than land in the past) how is it that, despite reducedstate supports, uncertain market conditions and new competitive actors,

they continue to rebu rationalisation and the economic imperative ocapital towards scale economies and survive? Te concluding passageso Part I thereore point to some o the survival mechanisms small scalearmers, which also directs attention to the (non-)unity or equation oarmer as peasant. Te kind o developments described in the rst parto this book thus indicate some o the new explanations that are needed,which will have to include the new complexities in global economicconditions.

Te urther introduction o economies o scale and rationalisationso business in the agricultural sector leave a deep impression on thecountryside, and the second part o this book comprises an investigationinto that and its linkage to poverty generally. As mentioned, Part II isintroduced by a theoretical perspective on socio-economic changes inurkish agriculture and rural structure Chapter 7 comprises a reviewo the literature on this. In the context o agricultural income rises andthe beginnings o rural-to-urban migration ater 1950, rural sociology inurkey ocused especially on migration and rural transormation, generallyapproaching this rom a developmentalist or modernist point o view. Te

peasantry and its environment were problematised, with considerationo issues around rural education, inrastructure, unemployment, healthprovision and, o course, migration. More recent work has begun to lookat some o the contemporary complexities questioning the village andpeasantry as unit o analysis, or example, and looking at the wideningincome generation base in villages which here serves as a launching pador an investigation into the socio-economic structures and dynamics orural lie today.


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Chapter 1

Changes in the rural population and its primary settlement unit, thevillage, comprise the subject matter o Chapter 8. urkey has a young andast growing population, but obviously, like anywhere in the (developing)

world today, this increase is centred on the cities. Te numbers o peopleliving in urkeys villages and hamlets have not risen as they have inurban areas during the last decades in act, the upheaval in agriculturehas seen them all, sharply. While this recent history marks both acontinuation o historical process (urbanisation), the scale o the urbanmigration and consequent rural depopulation represents a qualitativelynew dimension. But population changes are not just gross numbers, theyare demographics: that is, the people moving between rural and urbanareas are not necessarily a perect cross section o the populace. Chapter

8, thereore, investigates this. How is the rural population changing? Whatis happening to the village? And, by implication (as a continuation o thetheme o the peasantry), what is happening to the small scale agricultureproducer? Inquiry into these matters takes the orm o an analysis omigration, economic activities, incomes and the reshaping o the ruralpopulation o peasant armers as a social class.

Although rural population decrease has led to a reduction in agriculturalactivities, around a quarter o the labour orce remains employed in

agriculture. Tis labour orce, however, is not necessarily domicile inrural contexts. Urban migrants continue to arm the land, either directly,returning to their villages during seeding and harvesting time, or indirectly,renting their land to neighbours and other armers still living in the area(village or local town, or even both, on a seasonal basis). And while somevillages have just died, losing their entire populations, a limited number ovillages have witnessed a rise in the number o people living there. Tese aremostly retired people and the villages situated on the coast. Indeed, ageingvillage populations generally represent another trend, one that indicatesa grim uture. Another important area o change is in the structure o

the rural population employment. Non-arm and o-arm employmentare rising rapidly, and due particularly to the participation o women insuch paid activities, traditional orms o unwaged employment are waningin importance. And another conspicuous act that is the proportion ohandicapped people is higher in rural areas. Tese and other actors go toindicate that villages have a special social unction as asylums or the weak.

Considerations such as these aord insights into the uture o the armand village lie. Predictable trends include the continued survival o

smallholder arming due in part to the extent o mountainous terrain


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Introduction

in urkey, which operates in various ways as a preventative to economieso scale but an erosion o the peasantry as social class as their meanso subsistence diversies, thereby racturing their integrity as a single

grouping and mitigating against simple class analysis. estimony to this isthe lack o politicisation o the peasantry in urkey ater the manner o theVia Campesina movement. Small land owners will arm less and armernumbers decline in line with capitalistic development, with a continuedincrease in the number and size o large scale arms. Some villages willbecome living and holiday areas rather than arming spaces, or dual livingplaces, with amilies split between village and urban lives in respecto which the urkish bent to long summer sojourns in a second home,including in the amily village (the homeland, or memleket), represents

an important cultural phenomenon. Another phenomenon o the uturemay be the continued increase o urban armers, while the (oten reverse)migration o retired people (seasonally or permanently) rom cities to ruralenvironments suggests that pension villages will not only survive butincrease in numbers. Meanwhile, at the same time as the development ovillages as asylums or the weak, as centres o unemployment and residenceor those out o the labour orce, there will also be urther movements ourban wealth to rural areas, both through tourism, indigenous and alsooreign (as in many emerging and developing economies, the tourism

sector is a major income source or urkey), and also through satellitedevelopment linked to urban conurbations and industrial, service andtrading centres.

When the huge changes in agriculture and consequent loss o ruralpopulation are considered, the question o how the rural people and ruralmigrants survive is clearly a huge social issue. In act, the progress inagriculture is one o the main reasons or the rise o new kinds o poverty,in rural and urban areas (i.e. as outlined, but also urther to these typeso changes). Neo-liberal policies, that is, play a major role in determining

the new character o poverty at the start o the new millennium. Whatremains to be considered in the present study, thereore, is this residualproblem o poverty, residual in the sense that neo-liberalism, it is quiteclear now, is no magic solvent or hardship, as well as in the sense thatmuch o the traditional poverty o the peasantry remains but situated nowin the city, moved through migration to an alternative social setting, thato the new urban underclass. Tis by product o the neo-liberal distillationo agriculture then nourishes the capitalist project itsel with massivesupplies o labour, which eed the cycle o poverty with depressed wages

and unprotected working conditions. By way o an analysis o this situation,


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Chapter 1

its underlying dynamics and the response, the nal chapters here considerthe neo-liberal approach to poverty (Chapter 9), and the structuring opoverty and recent history o pro-poor and poverty reduction policies in

urkey today (Chapter 10).

Te neo-liberal approach to poverty is essentially constituted by emphasison wealth production as the best route to a worldwide reduction in thenumbers and hardships o the poor. Economies grow their way out opoverty (or, the global economy makes mass extreme poverty a thing othe past). Tis tends toward non-engagement with the actual problem asit maniests, while the dogma o non-state intervention leads to a stresson sel-help and an understanding o the issues involved that suggests

piecemeal charity rather than the developed social security systems builtthrough social struggle and nanced by taxation. Tis approach, in theeyes o many, has reached its limit. Neo-liberal does not, in act, addressunderlying causes o poverty such as structural inequality as an integralpart o the capitalist system o wealth production, and its one notablepositive policy, the championing o micro credit systems, is little morethan window-dressing, excellent or a relatively small number o peopleand groups with entrepreneurial ideas and vitality on the borderlines opoverty, but no more than scratching the surace o the problem as a whole.

Tis holds or urkey, too. Te lacko success o neo-liberalism in dealingwith worldwide poverty to date is reviewed in Chapter 8, taking the UNMillennium Goals as a starting point. Even according to this minimalindex, it is argued, results are less impressive than may be assumed. Abrie critique o the oundations o the neo-liberal approach to poverty isthen developed, including in this the perspective o distribution, or socialjustice.

As outlined in Chapter 10, urkeys current poverty reduction policieshave been maintained with IMF/World Bank supports, and continue toollow a course parallel to the neo-liberalizing poverty reduction policies othese institutions. Pro-poor policies since 1980 have increasingly consistedo aids rom charitable institutions, municipalities, non-governmentalorganisation and public institutions, rather than employment creationand income protection. Tese have thus ailed to impact on a distinctivecharacter o the new poverty in urkeys cities. Te old type o urbanpoverty constituted by the migration rom village to city was possible toescape indeed, this was expected through employment and supportrom the inormal support network o amily and village coupled with

that o the social security system. Te massive inux o migrants rom the


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Introduction

countryside during the neo-liberal dismantling o the countrys agrarianbase and the lack o concern o this approach with positive policies or jobcreation or employment protection combined also with other but linked

actors (such as in the area o housing) has meant that this is no longer so.People cannot escape urban poverty, and do not expect to, or even hopeto. Tis transition characterised here as a move rom rotation povertyto permanent poverty has also led to the development o variousorms o exclusion. Chapter 10 concludes with a review and critique othe implementation o the urkish governments social policies related topoverty and exclusion.

Te end o this study (Chapter 11) is comprised by a general evaluation o

the developments in agriculture and countryside and the historical placeo the smallholder in urkey in the present context o depopulation anddepeasantisation. It is uncertain how the transormations o capitalismpropelled by neo-liberalism will end, and the current dynamics odevelopment suggest questions like how many o todays villages will stillexist in a couple o decades, how will these survive villages and what kindo places will they be? Contrary to the negative implications behind thesequestions, however, the urther development o peasant (smallholder)survival strategies, increases in the non-agricultural usage o villages, and

various orms o population movements to rural areas have the potentialto reduce poverty in the countryside. It is entirely conceivable that eectivepolicies might be able to utilise and maximise these potentials and supportthe reduction o urban overcrowding while also supplying a better livingenvironment or the elderly in particular.


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Part I

Trends in Turkish agriculturesince 1980

Te rst part o this book seeks to identiy the major trends inurkish agriculture during the period since 1980. It begins with abrie look at the classical agrarian question and new approaches tothe question with reerence to an environment in which neo-liberalpolicies dominate and the tendency to globalisation prevails in theworld economy. Developments in urkish agriculture ater 1980are addressed through these conceptual tools. Chapter 3 providesa historical overview on the development o agriculture in urkeyprior to the introduction o neo-liberal policies, while the ourthreviews developments since then. Ten ollows in Chapter 5 ananalysis o the trends in urkish agriculture over the last threedecades, employing arguments made in the literature and empiricaldata. Te sixth, concluding chapter assesses the developments inurkish agriculture ater 1980 in the context o classical viewsand others that address the issue in the light o the contemporaryglobal circumstances. While classical approaches still have someexplanative power in understanding recent developments, newapproaches oer more in this respect. Nevertheless, there is a needor new eld studies to test and/or consolidate the elaborations

introduced by these new approaches.


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Chapter 2. The agrarian question

Tis chapter begins with the overview o the agrarian question. Teliterature on this subject is extensive, and here it is only introduced byway o establishing a conceptual ramework, with a presentation just othe rst (classic) exposition and recent revisions o the agrarian questionthat are. Parallel to the major, ongoing transormation in agriculture wewitness today, understanding and explanation o it are improving too.Until the recent past, the main questions had related to the ways in whichagriculture and the rural environment changed with capital accumulation.Sociological concern nowadays ocuses on how smallholder agriculture

and rural lie survive. Current explanations include the global dimensiono contemporary capitalism in their analysis o agrarian change, andinternational circumstances thus receive extra attention here also. It isthe aim o this chapter to give basic theoretical inormation summarisingagrarian and rural processes, to look at the main arguments o the originaland current explanations, rather than engage in detailed discussion.

Peasant-armers and change

Analyses o peasantry and agricultural structures in the process o capitalistdevelopment have been an important and highly debated issue. Dubbed theagrarian question, this ocuses on how in the context o a capitalistic worldsystem or a social ormation where capitalism is dominant, pre-capitalisticorms o production and enterprise types, particularly the existence opetty production, can survive and exist and how this persistence can beassociated with capitalism (Boratav 1981: 106).

Te development that can be expected to take place in agriculture when the

process o capital accumulation starts to operate in a given economy canbe put simply as the emergence, on the one hand, o peasants turning intoworkers having to sell their labour orce ater having lost their land, andon the other, o capitalist armers who expand their land by appropriatingothers and strive to maximise their prot by investing in agriculturalproduction. Another component o the same proc

Agriculture, Peasantry and Poverty in Turkey in the Neo-liberal Age

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