The last few years have been a period in which every problem that can be discussed under the heading of agriculture has deepened and multiplied for Turkey, which continues to boast of being an agricultural country because it does not face the real landscape. Agricultural lands are being sacrificed for investments in other sectors such as energy, mining, construction and tourism, which are seen as the main vein of the growth fetish.
In order to follow the story of the capitalisation of these lands, starting from the late Ottoman Empire to the early years of the Republic, it is indeed necessary to look at the land. The consequences of this process, such as the transformation of ownership and land cultivation methods, labourisation, mechanisation, dispossession, were of course manifested in the early period depending on the waves of the newly evolving global economy and political transformations. But this effect could also vary according to, for example, proximity to ports, whether or not one was part of the network of railways that mapped the division of the advanced capitalist powers; there were differences. Today, other factors determine possible regional differences, but otherwise the logic is the same, the imagination is the same and the course is grave.
The last few years have been a period in which every problem that can be discussed under the heading of agriculture has deepened and multiplied for Turkey, which continues to boast of being an agricultural country because it does not face the real landscape. Agricultural lands are being sacrificed for investments in other sectors such as energy, mining, construction and tourism, which are seen as the main vein of the growth fetish. Agricultural policies already support corporatisation and the labourisation of peasants. The gap between small producers and fair prices has widened even further. The working conditions of workers already employed in agriculture are getting worse and exploitation is increasing. In the last link of the chain, consumer health is also in danger because it is not possible for small producers who use heirloom seeds and try to produce without poisons to make a living in a system where industrial agriculture and the use of chemicals in production have become the norm.
There are unions affiliated to existing confederations where workers in agriculture can organise; as you can imagine, their power is determined by the general deunionisation policies of the country. However, since this sector relies heavily on uninsured, precarious, migrant labour, these workers do not even have the right to organise on paper. The youngest of the independent organisations, Tarım-Sen, founded with the support of Umut-Sen, is a union in the agriculture, fisheries and forestry sectors. The sector employs 180,000 people in forestry enterprises, animal and poultry farms, greenhouses, fish farms and landscaping companies for some municipalities. Tarım-Sen aims to organise small producers, including seasonal unregistered labour, and to wage an action-oriented struggle.
“At least he's insured”
Umut Kocagöz, the chairman of Tarım-Sen, who has also worked on this issue academically, sees this acceleration in the last few years as a result of the division of labour imposed by international markets. He reads it as the story of the evolution of an agricultural country into an assembly industry country, one of the world's logistics warehouses or the China of Europe, and describes it as ‘Anatolia is being redesigned as a global factory’. The final picture is as follows: Even farmers who see agriculture as their ancestral profession and love it are giving up the land as it is becoming increasingly difficult for them to survive, and neither the village nor the land provides a sustainable life for the younger generation. This is a rupture that cannot be labelled as young people despising their fathers‘ and grandfathers’ professions, and cannot be reduced to a clichéd generation gap. What is seen as an alternative is also thought-provoking.
Kocagöz also mentions that in the Kınık-Bergama-Soma basin, where he knows well, young people are turning to mining despite all the risks and heavy labour. Those who had been living on tobacco for generations gave it up due to tobacco policies and turned to olives, tomatoes and contract farming. In the same period, the fact that the region became the next mining basin after Zonguldak pushed young people into mining as an insured job. Kocagöz mentions that the organised industrial zones that are springing up all over Anatolia are shifting those who do not own land to insured jobs. When we consider the minimum wage, which has been bent and twisted in the face of high inflation, the extent of indebtedness and unsustainability for agricultural workers becomes clearer. Preferring because it being “at least they are insured”, seeing the minimum wage as a guarantee, is like a lifeline not to dye.
The invisible army of workers in greenhouses
In this destructive transformation of agriculture, one segment of workers who are not very visible to the public is those working in greenhouses. The resistance of workers at Agrobay Seracılık in Bergama, Izmir, who were dismissed from their jobs on the grounds that they were (or could have been) members of Tarım-Sen, which started in August of last year, broke this pattern. There are three lawsuits based on this chain of actions: One is a lawsuit filed on charges of resisting the security forces during detentions. The second is a lawsuit for compensation for the dismissals. The third is a lawsuit for non-pecuniary damages filed by the company on the grounds that its reputation was damaged during the protests. They are expected to be finalised in the first half of 2025.
These greenhouses, of which Agrobay is one of the largest, are enterprises that take the "global factory" out of the metaphor and actually bring factory norms to agricultural labour. Umut Kocagöz says that these greenhouses, some of which employ 300-400 workers, are no different from, lets's say, a factory in Esenyurt. These are factories where workers are transported by shuttle buses from distant places, where hierarchical discipline is the norm, where the pressure system of "come on, come on" is imposed on the workers. Profit greed and exploitation are the basis. Many of them produce only for export. Working in agriculture is never easy, but of course there is a difference between working for a small producer and being an agricultural worker in such a company.
Women are the overwhelming majority in this sector, doing all kinds of labour-intensive work no uttering a word, even doing "men's work" as the employers call it, and they are also experienced in agriculture. It is also significant that these "factories" where the sexist hierarchy operates also benefit from many women's employment incentives. Moreover, the gender-based division of labour continues after work, and women, the cheap workers of this heavy work, run home to feed their families and clean their houses.
So what kind of an agricultural landscape will this trajectory create in, say, five years' time? Umut Kocagöz is not optimistic: "The issue of pesticides was on the agenda five years ago, it is on the agenda more today, and it will be on our agenda even more in five years. Because there are fewer and fewer farmers who produce with traditional methods, without using pesticides, and with heirloom seeds. Another issue is worker’s health and safety measures. One of the things I saw during the Agrobay process was the intensive use of pesticides. This is reflected on both the product and the worker's body. Since I foresee that the number of workers working in such enterprises will increase in the next five years, I think that this aspect of worker health will become a bigger problem. There will be more and more export-oriented, large or medium-scale or greenhouse-type export-oriented enterprises that rely on intensive use of pesticides and fertilisers, and do not take worker health and safety measures seriously. Agriculture, which is done not to feed people but to make money, is one of the main causes of the food crisis.”
Let's come to the consumer ring. As a fresh example, figs from an export-orientated enterprise in İncirliova, Aydın, were sent back because they contained aflatoxin, which poses a great risk to food safety. Kocagöz draws attention to the effect of geothermal-induced air, soil and water pollution in the region as well as the production preferences of the enterprise. This enterprise went bankrupt, unable to pay its debts to farmers, traders, labourers or anyone else. “Who will pay for the crisis? Those at the bottom”, he says. And who will eat these figs? It is also sad that we are all almost certain of the answer.
