The food crisis in Turkey actually has a LOT of factors affecting the outcome. The influx of prices these past 2 months though, to be honest, are artificial.
Having said that, even at government "stall" prices,
Turkish products are priced very high. The reason for this isn't the "middle man" (which in all honesty means distributor). You will always need distribution centers no matter what economic model you try with agriculture. Even the "kooperatif" (cooperatives) style administration is a sort of distribution that
will also add prices to the product.
This is inevitable and normal.
So having said that, as with all countries that have high corruption and low moral among their population, Turkey also suffers from not enough regulation and food hoarding from time to time.
But this isn't a huge detriment on the prices - as this alone can't price a product 2x or 3x of what it should be around the year -
this can only cause spikes now and then.
1 - The Social Stigma
The first problem with agriculture in Turkey is that it's seen as derivative by
ALL the population. The high educated office workers see
farmers as "
waste of space", the general consensus (when you're among friends) is that "
I'm not sure these guys should be allowed to even vote".
This social stigma is also shared by the farmers themselves too. They see this life as something to be "rescued from", or something that is only temporary until their family can do something really worthwhile. This is a huge deal as the educated population is fleeing AWAY from this market - not towards it.
A small example here, I lived in the
UK for 5 to 6 years while my father did his post doctoral and thesis there at a university.
His PHD professor owned a sheep farm (not for shits and giggles). It was very common over there to see people farming and not be labeled as "ignorant" or "lowly". This allowed agriculture in general to spread out to the population. We lived in the suburbs in a house with large front and back gardens.
A similar house in turkey would be called a "villa" and have perfectly trimmed bushes and lawns artificially curated by some gardener you hired. Over there most people had compost piles, small greenhouses and actually grew some food.
This small percentage might not seem much to you, but when you realize almost EVERYBODY takes part in this the big picture begins to change. The social stigma associated with working with food is not present at all. While the backbone of industrial agriculture is in the hands of giant companies, these small gardens or slightly bigger family farms contribute hugely to the general logistics and flow of the food economy over there.
Back to my elitist country and
we have "hobby" gardens. I live in a pretty good neighborhood in Istanbul, my wife wanted to plant some tomatoes in the green space of our resident site. You can guess the answer she got. We, as a country and as a culture, are incredibly backwards and weird.
We pay to be able to go to hobby gardens and share our experience via social media - but some small scale actual gardening is nearly spat upon.
So, in my opinion, the number one factor of a food crisis in Turkey is that we look down on our producers - they even look down on themselves too. So
we have people migrating to cities to work in meaningless jobs that produce nothing of value,
JUST so we can avoid being "that family" that works in agriculture.
2 - Wasteful Food Production Methods
Next up is technology.
We are a very VERY wasteful nation with a load of conspiracy theories we love to indulge every effing day. Our country is in a very fertile piece of land compared to the world, and you can get incredible yields with very little effort.
This has led us to be a very lazy nation in terms of agriculture.
Our farmers are plain idiots to say the least. The Netherlands, with their scorched earth salted by the sea, has managed to be in the top 5 food producers in the world. They are a TINY country with no business being farmers as their land is not actually suitable for it - yet they've mastered the elements with hard work and state of the art technology.
We, on the other hand,
still rely on manual labor. This is very wasteful as our production potential per person has been on the growth (as is everywhere in the world)
and we're still using capable people as cheap labor. We pay 20 people to do work for 10 days, when we should be able to harvest the
same amount in a day with 1 machine. We also have no idea how to irrigate properly, or even how to do some basic crop rotation.
Another story time. The government of Turkey has built a huge complex of waterways and dams under the "South East Anatolia Project" (
GAP). While one of the reasons for these dams were to produce electricity,
a very important mission for them was to properly irrigate the vast and fertile lands of Anatolia. So the government made the waterways and carried water to the majority of farms. When people didn't use these properly
the government actually installed misting systems on individual farms (with no money charged). One of my friends whose uncle is such a farmer, straight up ripped the system off his land as soon as the government agents were gone. The thinking seems to be "
I've known farming for generations, I have no time for this bullshit".
Second story : The government also subsidizes water wells for farms. I might be wrong about the number, but I think they give 20k TL every 2 years for water wells to be dug up for farms. The same friend told me that people would straight up go shopping for themselves with this money, as a well would last around 3 to 4 years, and they didn't need to dig a new one every 2 years. So when they actually had to dig the new well they would be broke and apply for credits. Some would even leave the business.
Of course, these are small scale farmers in the grand picture - but the Turkish agricultural industry is mainly populated by these businesses. We don't have world scale huge companies to pick up the bulk of the work.
So the second reason for Turkey not managing to actually produce her own food properly is because her people are ignorant and lazy.
They refuse to adapt, they refuse to invest, and they refuse to modernize.
Tied in this with this is also the conspiracy theory nuts who refuse to eat anything but "organic" products. Anyone who's worked in any field of agriculture can tell you today what a sham that is. Todays technology enables us to get incredible yields with crops
by modifying them for different scenarios. This scares people, but what they don't realize is that farming is the art of doing this.
We've been doing this as the human race
for thousands and thousands of years. The only difference now is that we don't have to wait generations to perfect the crop to suit our needs,
we can do that in less then a decade now. It's the same shit - but a few truly evil companies (Monsanto for example) has muddied the water, so in countries that are extremely paranoid by nature (like Turkey) this is even a bigger can of worms.
This is another reason on why the Turkish agriculture industry has neglected to embrace technology properly.
3 - City Planning
We do not plan our cities. We don't plan our towns either - heck
we don't even plan our own houses properly. We like to "
go with the flow". This has bitten us in the *** many many times, but we're still stubbornly stuck in the ways of our ancestors : "
water flows and finds its way". As Turks
we are incredible problem solvers - and I'd put us in
the top 10 cultures in the world who can come up with innovative solutions to complex and hard situations.
The problem with this is that we only apply this when the shit is about to hit the fan.
We actually turn on the fan ourselves,
get the shit ourselves and
throw the shit, again, ourselves. Then when the shit is mid flight we
frantically run over and somehow manage to prevent it from hitting said fan.
This is, as you can see, a very wasteful method of nation building. The energy and effort we put into to try and fix the mistakes we create ourselves is outstanding.
One of the major culprits of this is city planning. Our cities, main arteries (roads) and railway networks are poorly placed around the country. It's like we took over a 15th century country with all the cities and roadways intact and we were stuck with this. So that's why it's all very inefficient. When in reality
we started building this country a mere 100 years ago. Sure we had some infrastructure in place - but the main problems we face as an industrial nation today, were also created by us, less then a 100 years ago.
This contributes wildly to the agricultural industry too. It effects the logistics, the planning and most importantly
where we do farming as a country.
Summary
Ok, I'm very sorry that this has been a huge wall of text, so in light of that I'd like to summarize it here. We are in a deep food crisis today because :
- Social Stigma Every part of the population thinks working in agriculture is beneath them, and the people that work there shouldn't even be allowed to vote. Thus, capable young Turks stay away from this industry.
- Technology We lack the tools to be efficient in agriculture. Not because we don't have the means to obtain or create them - but because we've been blessed with fertile lands and as a result we've taken the easy way out : manual labor trumps everything else.
- Urban Planning We lack plans for anything that goes beyond 20 years in this country. This has led the industrial logistics of everything we create to be a nightmare to say the least.
There are many ways to combat all of these, and most can be done by the government itself. Education, subsidies for high tech agriculture and actual planning urban centers with different industries in mind would go a long way.
But as of today, we're sticking band aids and hoping for the best.
This in not on AKP though, this is on every single damn government since Atatürk that has done virtually nothing for this industry but stick band aids for some cheap votes (AKP included).
