Development of Turkish Agriculture

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The Development of TurkishAgriculture: Debates, Legaciesand DynamicsTim JacobyPublished online: 20 Jun 2008.

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The Development of Turkish Agriculture:Debates, Legacies and Dynamics

TIM JACOBY

This article introduces three further contributions looking at the

Ottoman state, cotton production in Anatolia and Egypt and rural

indebtedness in western Anatolia during the nineteenth century. It

points to shared concerns the commercialisation of production, the

role of the state in surplus appropriation and geo-political

inuences over agricultural policy that link each of the subsequent

articles. The latter provides a useful basis on which to consider

contemporary debates about agrarian development in Turkey.

INTRODUCTION

With around one-third of its entire civilian workforce, half of its rural men

and almost 90 per cent of its rural women employed in an agricultural sector

still largely dominated by small family enterprises, Turkey remains the only

peasant stronghold . . . in or around the neighbourhood of Europe and the

Middle East [Hobsbawm, 1996: 338]. Although contributing a declining

overall share of the countrys GDP, the amount of land under cultivation has

remained relatively stable over the last two decades at*27 million hectares,around 50 per cent of which is given over to the cultivation of cereals. Of

these, over half, or nearly 20 million tonnes, is wheat. Crop production as a

whole constitutes around 75 per cent of the sectors output, with yields

highest in the Mediterranean provinces, lowest in eastern Anatolia and

averaging out at around two metric tonnes per hectare. This places Turkey

amongst the worlds largest producers of gs, apricots, hazelnuts, lentils,

watermelons and cucumbers; although cotton, sugar beet and tobacco

constitute the major industrial crops. It is also a major producer of livestock

with, until very recently, a considerable share of the worlds production of

Tim Jacoby, The Institute for Development Policy and Management, The University ofManchester, Arthur Lewis Building, Oxford Road, Manchester, M13 9QH, UK.E-mail: [email protected]. The author is very grateful to Robert Jacoby and PhilWoodhouse for comments on earlier drafts of this article.

The Journal of Peasant Studies, Vol.35, No.2, April 2008, pp.249267ISSN 0306-6150 print/1743-9361 onlineDOI: 10.1080/03066150802150985 2008 Taylor & Francis

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goat meat, sheep meat and, particularly, sheep milk [Cakmak et al., 2004: 15

16].

Consequently, agriculture remains an important area of the Turkish

economy. Despite tending to grow at a slower rate than other sectors (only

about 1 per cent per annum compared with an overall growth rate of about 4

per cent between 1980 and 2003), it still constitutes 10 or so per cent of the

countrys GDP (or US$40 billion). Of this, $4 billions worth, largely edible

fruit, is exported each year, amounting to around 14 per cent of the countrys

total annual exports. Although periodic sectoral trade decits have become

common as import restrictions are increasingly liberalised (leading to large

increases in high-value imports such as industrial crops, oilseeds and hides),

Turkey remains a net food exporter. To even out uctuations in agricultural

output, to introduce efciency savings in land-use and production and to

capitalise on Turkeys potential, a great number of reforms have been

introduced in recent years. These are expected to create protable

opportunities for the initiation of new projects for foreign as well as local

investors [Turkish-US Business Council, 2006: 10]. In particular, commer-

cial openings are expected to arise from closer ties with overseas markets

(especially those in Europe), from the marketisation of subsistence holdings,

from a greater emphasis on mono-cropping, from an expansion in Turkeys

internal market driven by changes in demography and consumption and from

further retrenchments in state inuence.

The following three articles aim to offer a historical context for these

developments by analysing three important aspects of Ottoman agricultural

production. Already on the decline during the nineteenth century, the

Ottoman Empire covered an area extending from the Balkans in the north to

Egypt in the south.1 Writing midway through the nineteenth century, the

economist J.R. McCulloch [1846: 825] having described the Ottoman

agrarian structure in some detail observed in tones of Victorian rectitude

that the agrant abuses consequent on such a system have brought the

Turkish empire to its present state of weakness and degradation; and the

necessity of making some very decided changes in the administration has

long been obvious . . . . But unfortunately the age of miracles is past, and

unfortunately nothing short of a miracle would sufce for the regeneration of

the Turkish empire.

The rst contribution, by Jacoby, adopts a macro-historical approach, and

offers an account of the ways in which the Ottoman states governance of the

rural economy changed as the empire expanded and then began to contract.

As such, it serves to contextualise the second and third papers, by Ozgur

Teoman and Muammer Kaymak and by G. Attila Aytekin, which both look at

aspects of Ottoman agrarian political economy during the nineteenth century:

namely, the commercialisation of cotton production in Turkey and Egypt,

250 THE JOURNAL OF PEASANT STUDIES

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and the structure and causes of rural indebtedness. Although adopting quite

different perspectives, each contribution is connected through three common

concerns: the commercialisation of production, the role of the state, and the

inuence of the geo-political arena. In this introductory article, these themes

will be used both to contextualise the discussion below and to consider how

the Ottoman legacy may be important in comprehending subsequent events

and contemporary debates. These particularly concern current deliberations

over the persistence of petty commodity production within the agrarian sector

of modern Turkey, the politics linked to this, and the impact of international

forces on national policy.

COMMERCIALISATION

Taken as a whole, the articles which follow conrm that, for many centuries,

a tension has existed between the imperatives of centralised authority and the

tendency of local elites to consolidate large, autonomous landholdings.

Frequently, these frictions have been driven by the seemingly incongruous

objectives of securing the supply of provisions to urban centres (particularly

Istanbul) although maintaining an adequate supply of revenue to the imperial

sc. Once the Ottoman empire stopped expanding, these contradictions

obliged the state to permit greater levels of provincial authority to develop

which, by the nineteenth century, had, in some areas of the empire, begun to

commercialise agricultural production. Perhaps the most signicant result of

this at least in the west of the Ottoman empire was, as all three of the

following contributions point out, the emergence and partial marketisation of

large rural estates known as ciftliks.2

The formation of such rural units is broadly in keeping with the classic

analysis of agricultural commodication (derived from Lenin, Kautsky, Mao

and others): that is to say, the continued development of capitalism will tend

to divide a previously undifferentiated peasantry into winners and losers,

ultimately leading to a class of large, capitalist farmers on the one hand, and

a class of landless agricultural wage-workers on the other [Richards, 1986:

4]. Accordingly, the commercialisation of agriculture will tend to

amalgamate arable land into larger holdings to which greater economies of

scale can then be applied. These estates also have the potential, as Teoman

and Kaymak suggest of Egypt later in this journal issue, to subordinate labour

under the power of the landowner, a process which may, as Marx observed,

become the master of the process of production and of the entire process of

social life, thereby helping to establish an exclusivity of land possession and

a more capitalised proprietary economy [cited in Mann, 1986: 410].

A key determinant in this process is uctuations in the supply and

character of labour. Famines and plagues, such as those that affected Europe

DEVELOPMENT OF TURKISH AGRICULTURE 251

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during the fourteenth century for instance, tend to make labour scarce and

agricultural plots more plentiful, thereby obliging landowners to pay workers

a higher wage or an increased share of the crop. This, in turn, introduces the

possibility that some peasants may accumulate capital as a result of

producing surpluses, and thus be able to pay others as substitute workers to

fulll labour-service obligations to the landowner in their place. An important

consequence of this kind of division of labour whereby some tenants cease

personally to carry out rental dues is that a previously undifferentiated mass

of petty commodity producers are, as Kautsky [1988], Lenin [1964] and Mao

[1954: 72ff., 9295] all argued, internally divided along class lines.3

It is, however, unclear if, rstly, such a process is a necessary corollary of

commoditisation and, secondly, if consolidation of land succeeds in

increasing productivity. Such an outcome can be related easily neither to

an economys conguration of land distribution nor, as Teoman and Kaymak

explain, to the simple availability of labour inputs. The presence of a

prosperous stratum of farmers controlling extensive tracts of terrain may thus

be as much an inefcient legacy of a feudal mode of production (in which

landowning elites collect rents that are then allocated to the maintenance of

the property rather than to innovative reinvestment) as an indication of

mature capitalism. Indeed, it is clear from Teoman and Kaymaks research

that the slow emergence of ciftliks in Western Anatolia and the Balkans did

not lead to the type of commercialisation which resulted from the more

export-orientated reorganisation of land distribution carried out in Egypt by

Muhammad Ali during the nineteenth century.

Part of the reason for this, they propose, may have been a combination of

the former regions comparatively low ratio of labour to available land and

the latters alluvial, and thus more tightly delimited, farming structure.

Potentially cultivable empty land in Anatolia remained abundant and, as

Caglar Keyder notes, individuals could (without establishing property rightsper se) open up, appropriate and take possession of state land. In the

ongoing absence of technological inputs that might have increased output

irrespective of the workforce, this meant that labour intensities were (in

contrast to Egypt where nascent industrialisation and the premium attached to

irrigable plots tended to place greater production pressures upon the

peasantry) likely to be restrained, ensuring that the commercialisation of

the north-western empire operate[d] predominantly in favour of consolidat-

ing peasant rights [Keyder, 1993: 181].

Such concerns with the position of the small producer endured, and came

to constitute an important component in the construction of Turkishness

during the later years of the empire and the establishment of the republic

during the 1920s.4 This was, perhaps, unsurprising given that the Balkan

Wars, the First World War and the subsequent war of independence had


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combined to halve the size of the Turkish peasantry and create widespread

food shortages.5 To restore the agricultural sector (and building on the

nineteenth century rural commercialisation described Aytekin), the new

republic abolished the land tithe which, at the time, was supplying the state

with 63 per cent of its direct taxation revenue and 23 per cent of its overall

income. Shortly afterwards, a new civil code was introduced which made the

permanent acquisition of private land easier to achieve and, amidst a general

decline in the land to labour ratio, helped to consolidate the predominance of

peasant property. The result has been that, despite urbanisation levels

increasing from 24 per cent of the population in 1927 to over 60 per cent

today, major changes to the distribution of land have not, as Table 1

illustrates, tended to occur [Arcanl, 1986: 42].

One explanation for this is that migrant smallholders, including many of

the 3.2 million Turkish nationals estimated to be currently living in Europe,

tend to lease out their land to middle-sized farmers rather than sell-up to

large-estate landlords. In 1994, for instance, the poorest fth of agricultural

households was found to derive more (11.3 per cent) of its income from rents

than each of the other wealthier quintiles (7.7, 6, 4.5 and 3.1 per cent,

respectively). It also received only a slightly larger share of its income from

salaries and wages than the sectoral average (13.7 per cent compared to 10.1

per cent). Although great regional variations doubtlessly exist village

enclosures and sharecropping continue to be noteworthy factors of production

in the southeast of the country it is clear that, despite the fact that the great

majority of plots have generally been too small to produce an adequate

subsistence income, landlessness and wagelabour have not emerged as

generalised consequences of agrarian change [Brookes and Tanyeri, 1999].6

The purpose of the contributions by Jacoby, by Teoman and Kaymak, and

by Aytekin, is thus to provide the agrarian context for a struggle with the state

over the establishment of property entitlements, the control of land and the

character of labour inputs which have, until recently at least, tended to favour

TABLE 1: THE DISTRIBUTION OF LAND IN TURKEY

Land size (ha)

Holdings (as percentage of total)

1952 1963 1970 1980 1991 2001

02 30.6 40.9 44.4 28 34.9 33.42.15 31.5 27.8 28.2 32.5 32.1 31.55.110 21.9 18.1 15.7 21 17.9 18.510.120 10.3 9.4 7.7 11.9 9.6 10.820.150 4.2 3.2 3.1 5.4 4.4 5.1450 1.5 0.6 0.9 0.7 0.9 0.7

Source: Adapted from Eder [2003].


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small cultivators over capitalist landlords. The themes to be discussed the

slow emergence of an intermediary class of provincial notables, the rise of

cash-cropping for export and nineteenth century patterns of rural indebted-

ness constitute a necessary backdrop to this social trajectory. More

specically, each contribution helps to explain how a broadly undiffer-

entiated Ottoman peasantry retained the capacity to engage in petty

commodity production during a period of rapid commercialisation in a way

that did not generate forms of industrialised agriculture.

Although the precise impact of these continuities (especially the

persistence of the peasant family farm) on the agrarian structure in particular

and rural conict in Turkey more generally remain much debated, the factors

which determine whether capitalist agriculture or petty commodity produc-

tion emerge out of the peasant background . . . [tend to be] those mediated by

and directly emanating from the state [Keyder, 1993: 176]. A crucial aspect

is the degree to which discourses about the desirability of modernity and

emancipation have been halted, not to say rolled back, as traditional forms of

religious ideology have become more prominent over recent decades

[Kasaba, 1997; Keyder, 1997]. The extent to which this development is

linked in turn to the ensemble of cultural survivals in the Turkish

countryside arising from the persistence of petty commodity production is a

moot point, but an important one.7

THE STATE

Writers about agrarian transition generally concur that it is vital to address

the question of the role of state policy in shaping the processes of

agricultural development and peasant differentiation and the implications of

the problems created by those processes for state action [Richards, 1986:

2]. Indeed, as the preceding section made clear, it is impossible to consider

the commercialisation of Turkish agriculture without at least an implicit

account of state action. Here, the three articles to follow make an important

contribution. In focusing on the developmental role of the state more fully

from the macro-historical concerns of the rst paper to the subsequent two

pieces comparative analysis of the states role in cotton production and

rural indebtedness each offers useful insights into not only the upheavals

of the nineteenth century but also the trajectory of rural transformation in

Turkey more broadly.

Perhaps the most far-reaching debate in this regard relates to Ottoman

specicity particularly as a source of explanatory propositions regarding the

incompleteness of Turkeys transition to capitalist agriculture. For writers such

as Mann, feudalism is largely a result of Europes monastic-episcopal

economy of feudal manors modelled on the late Roman villa. This form of


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political organisation, structured by what Mann describes as an agglomeration

of largely autonomous households, is said to offer the ruler only an indirect

form of power, apart from those labourers directly tied to his land, over his

subjects [Mann, 1986: 381]. By contrast, Ottoman efdoms for much of the

empires history were not, as the contribution by Jacoby explains, hereditary,

nor could they be allocated to lesser feudatories by major ef-holders. Knights

(sipahis) did not exercise juridical or full property rights over labour and land,

respectively.

For others, such as Haldon [1989], what Wickham [1985] called the

uniqueness of the east was more about divergences in superstructure than a

discrete Asiatic mode of production resting upon a fundamentally different

method of surplus acquisition. Reviewing this debate, which has largely taken

place in the pages of this journal [e.g. Keyder, 1983; Margulies and Seddon,

1984; Hann, 1985], it is possible to observe that the focus of these writers has

been, as Berktay himself notes, less on the state and rather more on grassroots

processes/structures: peasant cultivation, tenure patterns, and forms of

surplus extraction.8

Aiming to pursue similar objectives, Jacobys contribution to this issue

seeks to cast light upon constant centre-periphery tensions by deploying

Manns account of imperial power. It endeavours to develop a less static

account of Ottoman methods of extraction: one not based on the assumption

that a kind of equilibrium existed which facilitated the states appropriation

of the peasants surplus in conditions of relative stability [Byers and Mukhia,

1981: 278]. Instead, it argues that the distinction between the peasantry and

the ruling class, whereas sophisticated and exible, was subject to uctuating

centre-periphery tensions throughout the history of the Ottoman empire. As

such, it aims to offer a theorisation of the Ottoman state and its structures of

domination that overcomes simplistic East/West demarcations be they

characterisations of an arbitrary, indulgent and exploitative occident versus a

uniform, just and legitimate orient (which Halil Berktay identies as the

central (but never openly acknowledged) proposition in contemporary

Turkish nationalist historiography) or a Europe as the locus of the dynamic

motor of modernity, with a spirit of rationality, liberty and justice contrasted

with a vision of Asia [as] the realm of despotism, fanaticism and historical

xity that continues to color[ ]European views of Turkey today [Berktay,

1987: 321; Larabee and Lesser, 2003; Zubaida, 2003: 63].

Indeed, Teoman and Kaymaks research suggests that differences within

modes of production are, perhaps, as signicant as those between modes of

production. In a similar vein, Brenner [1976] has long argued that French

absolutism represents an important exception to general patterns of feudal

development. Others, such as Teschke, have gone further and suggested that

pre-revolutionary France constituted a sui generis social formation,


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displaying a specic mode of government and determinate pre-modern and

pre-capitalist domestic and international laws of motion [Teschke, 2003:

191]. A comparable divergence may be deduced from Teoman and Kaymaks

observation that the slow emergence of ciftliks in Western Anatolia and the

Balkans did not lead to the type of commercialisation which resulted from the

more export-orientated reorganisation of land distribution carried out in

Egypt by Muhammad Ali.

Although sharing a concern to maintain the supervisory power of the state,

the focus of latter approach upon large-estate farming and industrialisation

can be quite sharply contrasted with the rentierism of the Ottoman heartland

where attempts to stimulate agricultural production tended to be couched

more in terms of increasing revenue to imperial coffers than generating

accumulation, private wealth and the power of landlordism [Arcanl, 1986:

32]. This historical difference may help to explain the greater inequality of

land distribution which emerged in Egypt [Abdel-Fadil, 1975; Hopkins,

1987].9 At the time of the 1952 revolution, for instance, a mere 0.4 per cent of

the largest landholders controlled 34 per cent of the countrys cultivatable

land. This compares with a census carried out at that time in Turkey which

revealed that (although inequality remained acute) 6 per cent of village

households farmed 41 per cent of the total cultivatable land. Each country

remained, however, dominated by smallholdings (55 per cent of Egyptian and

40 per cent of Turkish holdings were divided into plots of 10 hectares or less

in 1952) [Abou Mandour and Abdel Hakim, 1995: 8; Aksit, 1993: 190].10

Although this remains the case, states seeking to commercialise

agricultural production have always, as Teoman and Kaymak note, been

faced with the possibility that farmers will react to adverse market conditions

by withdrawing their surpluses and returning to the level of subsistence. In

response, governments (driven by the kinds of motives Aytekin identies)

frequently use reforms to the ownership and/or use of land as well as a

combination of taxation, acquisitive price-xing and subsidised technology

to ensure food security [Birtek and Keyder, 1975: 448]. The Turkish state, for

instance, succeeded in redistributing 2.2 million hectares of, mostly its own,

land (as well as reallocating a further 3.4 million hectares of meadow and

pasture to common usage) to 432,117 families between 1945 and 1973.

Although this involved the expropriation of only 5400 hectares from entitled

landowners, a small decline in overall inequality resulted the share of land

controlled by the top 6 per cent of landowners had dropped to 35 per cent by

1980 [Demirel and Gulsever, 2007].11

Ankara has also long maintained a comprehensive system of price

subsidies. These were initially introduced to offset the contraction in the

domestic economy caused by the curtailment of imports following the 1929

crash. Thenceforth, the state, through broadly agential sales cooperatives and


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unions, re-established itself as the primary buyer of a wide range of

commodities (cereals) in ways quite similar to the types of Ottoman market

supervision that are discussed in the contribution by Jacoby to this journal

issue.12 Combining its subsidies with other transfers (such as input support

for seeds, fertilisers and pesticides) the state contributed around 30 Turkish

lira for every 100 lira earned by the producer for much of the post-war era

[Cakmak, 2004: 1315]. As the following three articles illustrate, such a

central role for the state emerges from the overriding, yet frequently

contradictory, concern to prevent decentralised challenges to its authority

while ensuring supplies to urban centres. The result, Aytekin points out, has

been a general indifference to the plight of the Ottoman peasantry so long as

productivity and revenue remain adequate. This certainly appears to be true

of Muhammad Alis reorganisation of waqf lands during the early part of his

reign (see Teoman and Kaymak), suggesting an antecedent to a general

difference between a more modern policy designed primarily to extract a

surplus from agriculture (Egypt) and one constructed to support agricultural

income and, therefore, domestic demands for industrial products (Turkey)

[Richards, 1986: 2, parenthesis in original].

As in the past, though, considerable modal differences exist within the

Turkish state. The mass displacement of farmers that has resulted from pro-

Kurdish activism and the vast Guney Dogu Anadolu Projesi (whichproposes to construct 21 dams, 19 hydroelectric power stations and to

irrigate over 1.7 million acres at an estimated cost of over US$32 billion)

has been used by the government, in ways not unlike those identied by

Aytekin as features of the Portes response to civil unrest in the nineteenth

century, as a coercive means of securing the loyalty of local elites in the

southeast of the country.13 Operating largely through martial law (emergency legislation), patronage has taken priority over productivity,

thereby ensuring that a few individuals with good party connections have

succeeded in getting the state to allocate large tracts of land to them

[Barkey and Fuller, 1998: 190].

By contrast, the agricultural sector of the west of the country has, as

each of the three subsequent articles in this journal make clear, long been

seen as the countrys economic heartland. Two-thirds of the 401 projects

the Industrial Development Bank helped to fund between 1950 and 1960

were in Turkeys wealthiest province, Marmara. By 1975, its capital,

Istanbul, was home to half the countrys major industrial establishments

and absorbing over 40 per cent of all public credits. The state continues to

commit around 30 per cent of its entire public expenditure there today,

despite the fact that, as the following section goes on to explain, it has

continued to benet considerably from its economic contacts with Europe

[Jacoby and Ozerdem, 2008].


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GEO-POLITICS

Each of the three articles to follow underlines the role overseas states

played in the political economy of the Ottoman Empire. Amid a more

general assumption of inuence within the realms of commerce, industry

and law, agriculture was also becoming increasingly subject to the interests

of the European Powers during the nineteenth century. As the mercantile

capital of the Wests early developers overowed into the Balkans, the

Empires Mediterranean seaboard and, particularly, the Levant, inward

investments, commodity production for export and, in some areas,

expatriate settlement grew rapidly. This led to various limitations upon

the Portes sovereignty (see the contribution by Jacoby) and a restricted

capacity to determine the direction of its economy the most obvious

example of which was debt. Because the liquidity of specie and the social

relations which surround indebtedness remain comparable at various levels

of analysis, it is useful to locate the patterns of rural credit examined

shortly by Aytekin within a broader context of imperial borrowing. By the

1870s, the cost of the Portes defensive modernisation had produced

unpaid loans of more than 20 billion kurus (the annual interest upon which

was 1.4 billion kurus), obliging Istanbul to appoint a Public Debt

Administration made up of French, British and German creditors. Backed

up by a capitulations system which granted foreign nationals a wide

variety of benets and immunities, the Administration assumed control over

most of the states key agricultural monopolies and, between 1881 and

1908, redirected over 30 per cent of the economys entire tax revenues to

the payment of foreign debts [Howard, 2001: 77].14

Today, the situation is not entirely dissimilar. With a long history of

support (during the 1950s, alone, Ankara received nearly US$200 million in

loans from the major international nancial institutions in return for a wide

range of economic reforms), Turkey is currently the International Monetary

Funds largest borrower. With a debt to GDP ratio of between 50 and 100 per

cent since 2001, the government has been obliged to guarantee the repayment

of over US$15 billion of overseas loans in 2008 terms comparable with that

which led to the Ottoman default of 1881 and to agree to a wide range of

economic reforms.15 Particularly targeted has been the states support of

agriculture production which, as a percentage of GDP, was running at

between three and four times the OECD average for much of the 1990s.

Under the Agricultural Reform Implementation Project, announced in June

2000 and accompanied by a further $600 million loan from the World Bank,

input and credit subsidies were abolished and the price-setting functions of

state institutions and purchasing unions were removed. By the end of 2002,

the Bank was able to conclude that, amid a 13 per cent decline in real


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agricultural prices, an overall cut in scal outlays of $5.5 billion (or 2.7 per

cent of Turkeys GDP) had been realised [World Bank, 2004].

Despite being accompanied by an income support system, the result has

been (in a pattern not entirely different from the effects of market uctuations

in Ottoman cotton production which Teoman and Kaymak describe) an

overall contraction in crop production (of 6 per cent), in livestock numbers

(of 20 per cent) and in the use of previously subsidised inputs (particularly

chemical fertilisers which have dropped by over 25 per cent).16 The

government responded by expanding income support to include all farms up

to 50 hectares (thereby incorporating over 99 per cent of all holdings),

gradually buying up unsold surpluses, writing off unpaid utility bills,

releasing US$2billion of new credit and, under the 2006 Agricultural Law,

reserving the right to adjust support instruments by up to 25 per cent of their

value [OECD, 2007]. Although it is too early to ascertain the full impact of

these measures, it has already become clear that they have contributed to the

widening of relative as well as absolute income inequality, as the higher

income regions [of the country] use subsidized inputs relatively more

intensively than the lower income regions [Cakmak, 2004: 17].

With an 80 per cent share in Turkeys foreign direct investment and 50 per

cent of its imports, the European Union (EU) has been instrumental in

inuencing these reforms. Although the Customs Union of 1996 had excluded

agricultural products, the 1963 Ankara Agreement and the 1973 Added Protocol

both envisaged harmonisation with the European Common Agricultural Policy

an objective supported by an agreement to cut export subsidies and tariff

protection on a wide range of products at the Uruguay round of GATT in

1994.17 As these have taken effect, Turkey has become the EUs seventh biggest

trading partner (up from 9th in 1990) and the destination for 4 per cent of its

total exports. Despite such access to Turkish markets, the over protection of the

EU for the agricultural sector remains high, and for some major export products

of Turkey (fruits, vegetables and processed products) seasonal ad valorem

tariffs and TRQs [tariff rate quotas] are applied [sic] [Cakmak et al., 2004:

112; initial parenthesis in original]. The EU15 countries have, for instance,

contributed an average of between 29 and 43 per cent of their producers

earnings since 1986 signicantly higher than Turkeys support rate of between

3 and 29 per cent over the same period [OECD, 2007].18

As Ankara prepares for entry into the Common Agricultural Policy under

the terms of the acquis communautaire, this combination of greater domestic

competition, increasing compliance standardisation, reduced subsidies and

imperfect market access is widely expected to merge divided landholdings,

push many [more] small farms out of the market and accelerate the

commercialisation of production [Bayaner, 2006: 10; Turkish-US Business

Council, 2006: 53]. The result, the Turkish government hopes, is that land use


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will become more efcient (particularly in terms of labour inputs once the

effect of direct income support is gradually phased out), yields will increase

and prices to consumers will decline, thereby providing a more egalitarian

method of income distribution than Turkeys tradition of support subsidies.

Since producers are predominantly based in the countryside and consumers in

larger towns and cities, however, the short to medium term impact of these

measures is likely to be a signicant resource transfer from rural areas to the

major conurbations, thereby reversing the Ottoman tradition, accelerating

urbanisation and, in the longer term, perhaps, signalling the end of Turkey as

the regions last remaining peasant stronghold.

CONCLUSION

In Turkey, questions over how the issues considered above relate to

agricultural production and rural class structure have been debated

extensively for a great many years. Particularly contentious have been

discussions over the extent to which the Turkish countryside can be

considered to have been transformed by all the characteristics associated

historically with capitalist development: the commercialisation of production

leading inexorably to the elimination of peasant family farming, a process of

depeasantisation linked in turn to the growth of landless workers.

The articles to follow this introduction provide an account of the

background to and origins of such commercialisation. They help to explain

the persistence of petty commodity production, the enduring preponderance

of the state in the process of surplus appropriation, and the continuing

inuence of Europe over agrarian policy. As noted, each of these elements

is vital in developing a fuller understanding of contemporary debates and

processes related to Turkeys distribution of farmland, intra-state variations

in the structure of governance, and the effects of exposing the agricultural

sector to international markets and the geo-political pressures that this

brings.

NOTES

1 In one form or another, the Ottoman Empire lasted from the beginning of the fourteenthcentury until the early 1920s, when the Turkish Republic was established by Kemal Ataturk,and from which point a modern/nationalist/secular Turkey is said to emerge [Lewis, 1961].The decline of the Ottoman empire has been said to date from many different historicalepisodes and conjunctures, among them the battle of Lepanto in 1571 and the siege and battleof Vienna in 1683.

2 All technical terms used in the three articles are included in the composite glossary thatfollows this introduction.

3 The differentiation of the peasantry into a rich, middle and poor stratum is a form ofcategorisation that separates a broadly Marxist approach from a populist one.


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4 The representation of the rural populace as a source of purity and spiritual solace has beenan important literary theme for centuries, and it became an integral component ofproto-nationalism which Muslim provincial elites promulgated as they increasingly came intoconict with ascendant non-Muslim subjects (the antecedents and dynamics of which arediscussed more fully in the contribution by Jacoby to this journal issue). The writers YusufAkcura (born in the Tatar city of Ulyanovsk in 1876) and Ziya Gokalp (born the same year inthe Kurdish city of Diyabarkr), for instance, were particularly inuential in this regard and,in many ways, helped to establish the ideological basis for the new Turkish republic [Karpat,1972].

5 At the Baku Congress of the Peoples of the East in 1920, the Comintern [1977: 110]highlighted the impact of the 191418 war on the peasantry in the following manner: Let uslook at Turkey, which has played a big role throughout the East. It is a striking picture, atwhich we have only to glance in order to feel the social ghastliness of rural life as led by theTurkish peasantry. Twelve years of unbroken rule in Turkey by the party of Disunion andRegress [ Young Turks or the Committee of Union and Progress], crowning theprevious nightmare history of the Sultans absolutism, has brought the Anatolian peasants to astate of pauperism. Here is the picture. Far off on the horizon we see a Turkish aul [ villageof Muslim peasants]. In the foreground a grey-haired old Turk is ploughing the land: he hasharnessed to the plough, along with his one and only ox, his own daughter. The tremendoussocial signicance of this picture is clear. All the young men have been taken away fromproductive work to ght in wars, and almost all the draught animals have been killed. This isthe economic dead-end into which Turkish absolutism, with the benevolent co-operation ofWestern imperialism, has led the Turkish peasantry.

6 Although the scale of urbanisation, overseas migration, non-agricultural waged labour andabsentee farming casts some doubt over the ease with which it can be equated with pettycommodity production, the resilience of smallholding peasant proprietorship in Turkey is allthe more remarkable given the rapidity and scale of commercialisation during the post-warperiod. Between 1948 and 1954, alone, the number of tractors rose from 1756 to 37,740,trailers from 140 to 18,088 and combines from 268 to 4705 (today, there are more than onemillion tractors and 12,000 combines). Yields have also doubled since the 193945 war, assteady rises in average caloric intake (from 3045 calories per day in 1970 to 3416 caloriesper day in 2000) have driven up consumption [Cakmak et al., 2004].

7 This is, of course, a complex process, connected frequently (and in other parts of the globaleconomy) to the kind of identities deployed by peasant smallholders engaged in resistingneoliberal capitalist penetration. Among the discourses such grassroots agency generates effectively, it has to be said are ones defending historical patterns of culture, belief andbehaviour, the erosion of which is then attributed to new forms of economic development,the latter being depicted as an alien ( foreign) intrusion.

8 Other contributions to this debate include Keyder [1987] and Aydin [1990]. To be fair,Keyder has always contextualised grassroots processes/structures: by for example givingdue weight to the role of the Republican state in Turkish history [Keyder, 1988].

9 The classic pre-revolutionary account of the Egyptian peasantry, rst published in 1938 asMoeurs et Coutumes des Fellahs, is by Ayrout [1963]. Important studies of land tenure,agrarian reform, rural poverty and village life generally at around the time of the 1952revolution in Egypt include Warriner [1948, 1957] and Ammar [1954].

10 See also the case studies by Glavanis [1990] and Stauth [1990].11 A similar pattern emerged in Egypt where Agrarian Reform Laws, enacted between 1952 and

1970, redistributed almost 90,000 hectares (*12.5 per cent of the total agricultural land area)to about 342,000 rural households (*9 per cent of the rural population in 1970). By 1990, thetop 0.8 per cent of landowners share of cultivatable land had dropped to around 24 per cent[Abou Mandour and Abdel Hakim, 1995: 9].

12 Important examples of state institutions include TMO (grain), TSFAS (sugar), TEKEL(tobacco and alcohol) and CAYKUR (tea). By 1999, these four state institutions alone wereemploying over 88,000 staff. The larger purchasing unions covered cotton, silk, soybeans,hazelnuts, roses, pulses, pistachios, olives, sunower seeds, raisins, gs and mohair and had amembership of more than 700,000 producers in 1999 [Schmitz et al., 1999: 2, 4].


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13 The mass ooding of arable land (the Ilsu Dam alone will ultimately necessitate thecompulsory resettlement of more than 16,000 farmers), the evacuation of more than3500 rebel villages (dislodging at least 350,000 people) and the formation of a 65,000-strong village guard militia (with an additional 335,000 to 400,000 salaried familymembers) has created at least one million internally displaced people [Ozerdem and Jacoby,2007]. Such programmes of forced migration are, in fact, a long-established method ofdealing with peripheral dissent. As former President Suleyman Demirel put it, the recentperiod of Kurdish insurgency is being dealt with like the previous 28 revolts [KurdishHuman Rights Project, 1996: 4].

14 These measures helped to consolidate the place of foreign capital, which had been long relianton a comprador class of foreign proteges, within the western empires manufacturing sector.Because Ottoman agricultural production rested more upon the power over the peasantry thancontrol of the land, though, direct overseas investment in farms (such as the British ciiks which farmed an estimated 200,000 hectares by 1892 examined by Teoman and Kaymak inthis journal issue) proved only infrequently successful [Arcanl, 1986: 3437].

15 The result is a level of foreign inuence that has a striking resemblance to an earlierprogramme of normalisation which operated over independent states through capitulationswhich required them to acknowledge the extraterritorial jurisdiction of Western states[Hindess, 2005: 1390]. For instance, the World Bank and the International Monetary Fund,seeking to protect current foreign direct investments levels of over US$18 billion (up fromUS$1.7 billion in 2003), have used, respectively, the threat of withholding US$15.7 andUS$1.7 billion loans to secure the privatisation of much of Turkeys telecommunicationssector [The New York Times, 10 July 2001; Zaman, 11 February 2007].

16 Despite being initially directed only at smallholdings of less than 20 hectares, this system(like the price support regime which had generally beneted farms with higher outputs itreplaced) tended to favour larger landowners who simply reneged on sharecropping andtenancy agreements and reregistered their holdings as smaller plots in the names of familymembers. Given that these measures have occurred during a period in which the ofcialunemployment rate has almost doubled and real wages have fallen by around 20 per cent(since 1997), it is unlikely that meeting some of farmers losses will stimulate Turkeysdomestic market [Yeldan, 2006].

17 See Raghavan [1990] for a critical analysis of the impact on less developed countries of theUruguay Round and the General Agreement on Tariffs and Trade (GATT).

18 The EU 15 consists of Austria, Belgium, Denmark, Finland, France, Germany, Greece,Ireland, Italy, Luxembourg, Netherlands, Portugal, Spain, Sweden and the United Kingdom.Their average annual support of agricultural producers from 1986 to 2006 was 36 per cent.The comparable gure for Turkey for the years (19862005, data for 2006 are not yetavailable) is 20 per cent [OECD, 2007].

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GLOSSARY

AcquisCommunautaire

The term acquis communautaire, or EU acquis, refers to the totalbody of EU law accumulated thus far. For the negotiations withCroatia and Turkey over accession, it was divided into 35chapters covering a wide range of reform and compliances.

Amil A tax-collector, state agent or prefect.Ard al-wassiyah The land reserved for the exclusive enjoyment of multezim (see

below).Askeri Though term itself literally means of the military, it more broadly

encompasses all higher levels of Ottoman imperialadministration. Both Muslims and non-Muslims holding politicalofce in the service of the Empire could be considered askeri.

Asper A silver coin of about a gram in weight. Of Byzantine origin, theOttomans referred to it as akce.

Ayan The plural form of the word ayn meaning eye in Arabic, thisdenotes the notables, respected and eminent people of a city,town or society.

Barrani Extraordinary taxes.Bey (or beg) A Turkish title broadly equivalent to lord, it was used for tribal

leaders, high civil and military functionaries and the sons of theeminent (particularly pashas).

Cift-hane An agricultural unit based on peasant family: a peasant familyfarm.

Cizye A special Islamic poll-tax imposed on non-Muslim adult men in theOttoman Empire in return for an exemption from military duty.

Defterdar The keeper of the defter (an account or letter-book used inadministrative ofces), this normally refers to the chief nanceofcer in the Ottoman Empire.

Emin Literally faithful, trustworthy, this administrative title usually isusually translated as a salaried commissioner to bedistinguished from a tax-farmer, a grantee, or a lessee of anykind.

Fatwa A religious edict or a ruling on Islamic law issued by a Muslimscholar.

Feddan Literally a yoke of oxen, this was the standard measure of land inEgypt between ninth and fteenth centuries at which time it wasequal to 6368 m2. From 1830 onwards, one feddan came tocorrespond to 4200.833 m2 (1.038 English acre).

Fellah A peasant or agricultural labourer in Arab countries especially inEgypt. Because it is derived from the Arabic falh (the act ofcleaving and cutting) Fellah can also be translated asploughman.

Hali ciftlik (ormazraa) mezraor ekinlik

Generally, this refers to arable land or simply elds. In Ottomansurvey registers, it designates a periodic settlement or a desertedvillage and its environs.

Hane Named after its founder, Abu Hanifa an-Numan ibn Thabit (699767), this is the oldest of the four schools of thought (Madhhabs)or jurisprudence (Fiqh) within Sunni Islam.

Harem A term applied to those parts of a house to which access isrestricted to family members, and hence more particularly to thewomens quarters.

Ibadiya Used in nineteenth century Egypt for land surveyed in 1813 underMuhammad Ali, but not taxed because it was uncultivated.

(contd)


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Icare-i muaccele A down-payment made by lessee to the treasury at the time oflease.

_Ihtikar (or inhisar) The monopolies and restrictive practices of Ottoman guilds.

Iltizam A form of tax-farm used in the Ottoman Empire.Kalemiyye Literally those of the pen, this scribal institution was

headquartered in the Sublime Porte and eventually became thelocus for imperial modernisation as formal departments wereestablished and developed. It came to include the nance,commerce, interior and foreign affairs ministries.

Kharaj A type of Ottoman land tax.Kirjal Armed irregulars (similar to sekban) in the service of provincial

notables (particularly ayans) in the Balkan provinces of OttomanEmpire from the eighteenth century onwards.

Kocabas Local notable and/or leader of Christian communities in the someOttoman territories. Although civilians representing theircommunities to the state, they also took on semi-ofcialfunctions such as collecting communal taxes and fees. Their rolefaded away after the administrative reform of 1864.

Kurus Derived from the German groschen, it was a currency subunit. OneTurkish lira was equal to 100 kurus (or piastre). Originally a largesilver coin, in the mid 1800s its value had depreciated to the pointwhere it circulated as both a large copper coin (as 40 para) and avery small silver one as well. A currency reform in 2005 led to itsreturn as 1/100th of the New Turkish Lira as the Yeni Kurus.

Malikane A term made up from the Arabic malik (owner) and the Persiansufx -ane (in the manner or way of), it was to describe the fullownership of scal revenues.

Mamluk Originally slaves from the Caucasus, the Mamluks were membersof an Egyptian military class who were in power from about1250 to 1517 and inuential until 1811 when they were defeatedby Muhammad Ali.

Mevat A juridical term designating uncultivated lands.Millet Although this term came to be applied to specically non-Muslim

communities, it can be more generally understood to refer to anyone of the empires distinguishable peoples.

Miri Literally pertaining to the commander or governor, the amir, thisterm was used interchangeably to refer to lands belonging to thestate, the tax levied from that land or simply the public treasury.

Moudir A provincial governor or the head of a department.Mukataa The sum handed over by a tax farmer in return for the collection

and management of the revenue from a given province ordistrict.

Multezim A tax-farmer who, from the mid-sixteenth century on, collectedtaxes and dues on behalf of the Ottoman Treasury. Particularlyused within the Arab provinces of the Empire.

Mutaahhit A holder of an uhda (see below).Omdeh A notable in an Egyptian rural community who was responsible to

the government for the payment of all taxes, for militaryconscription and the corvee and for all the other ofcialobligations of the village.

Orf Customary practices incorporated into laws additional to thosespecied in the shariah.

Pasha The highest ofcial title in the Ottoman Empire, it survived forsometime after the formation of the Turkish republic in countriessuch as Egypt, Iraq and Syria.

(contd)


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Piastre An Ottoman monetary unit (originally called the kurus) rstintroduced in 1688. It was subdivided into 40 para, each of 3akce.

Reaya A member of the tax-paying classes of Ottoman society. Literallymeaning members of the ock, it included Christians, Muslims,and Jews who were shorn (i.e. taxed) to support the state andthe askeri.

Riba Forms of usury forbidden in Islamic economic jurisprudence. Someidentify thus as instances of excessive or exploitative charging ofinterest, while others dene it as concept of interest itself.

Riyal Derived from the silver real rst issued in Spain in fourteenthcentury, this term is used loosely to refer to coins from a numberof Muslim countries.

Selamlk The outer, more public rooms of a traditionally arranged house thatare typically used for receiving guests and non-family members.

Senlendirme (or ihya) Literally bringing to life, this refers to putting a piece of(particularly) mevat land to use in Islamic law.

Seyyye Derived from the Arabic term sayf (sword), the Ottomans usedthis term to refer to various types of troops in the imperialmilitary.

Sipahi An elite mounted force, they resembled the knights of medievalEurope. The Sipahi was the holder of a ef of land (the tmar)granted directly by the Ottoman sultan and was entitled toincome from that land, in return for military service.

Subas Commonly known as a ef-holding ofcial with administrativefunctions and police authority over other functionaries as well asthe inhabitants of a district. More specically, it may refer to thesteward of a big agrarian estate in some Balkan provinces of theEmpire.

Tmar A system in which the projected revenue of a conquered territorywas distributed in the form of temporary land grants ascompensation for annual military service. The tmar could besmall, granted by governors, or large which required a certicatefrom the Sultan. In both cases, they served as a means of payingthe army, generating tax revenue and bringing land under directOttoman control.

Uhda A form of land tenure established by Muhammad Ali in the 1830swhich resembled the old iltizam system.

Ulema Muslim scholars who have completed several years of training andstudy in one or more of the several elds that make up theIslamic sciences. Generally well versed in legal jurisprudence,many specialise in other sciences, such as philosophy, theology,history, literature or Quranic hermeneutics.

Ushr The tithe in Islamic law.Vergi-yi Mahsusa Literally special tax, it referred to an annual cash-based payment

from households after the Tanzimat reforms of 1839.Waqf An inalienable religious endowment, typically devoting a building

or plot of land for Muslim religious or charitable purposes. Waqfrevenue was generally not taxed and thus lay outside the statescontrol.

*Compiled by Tim Jacoby, E. Attila Aykekin, Muammer Kaymak and Ozgur Teoman. TheGlossary is a composite, and covers terms found in the following articles by Tim Jacoby, byE. Attila Aykekin and by Ozgur Teoman and Muammer Kaymak.


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Documents

Development of Turkish Agriculture