Turkey to become EU’s vegetable depot, report looks ahead
Posted by meb at February 12th, 2007
Structural change in Turkish agriculture would intensify after EU accession, identifying subsistence agriculture as an important role in Turkish rural areas and a key function in terms of a social buffer, a report sponsored by the European Commission suggested. It also said Turkey will become the Union’s depot for vegetables and fruits with a prospect that it becomes a member by 2015.
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The European Centre for Nature Conservation, the Central European University and the European Landowners Organisation “Scenar 2020 — Scenario study on agriculture and the rural world” report looks at change in the coming 15 years. It identifies the impact of population, economic change, agricultural markets and environmental conditions on agriculture and rural regions as well as the Common Agricultural Policy (CAP). It assessed Turkey’s agriculture sector foreseeing European Union membership by 2015.
The report says that Turkey’s agriculture capacity was equal to the total agriculture volume of the EU ten member countries before Bulgaria and Roumania. The report also says there would be a decline in Turkey’s production in traditional northern Europe agricultural products like meat and grain, but Turkey’s advantage will lie in fruits and vegetables.
Turkey is discussed in the enlargement chapter. “For all scenarios –baseline, liberalization, regionalization– in this study it is assumed that Turkey will join the EU in 2015. All measures implemented for the accession of the EU-10 and Bulgaria and Romania are also applied to Turkey,” said the report.
It emphasizes that with Turkey’s accession, the EU’s total agricultural sector would increase in terms of utilized agricultural area by more than 39 million hectares. “In 2000, around 12.5 million people were actively involved in agricultural activities, and 48 percent of the economically active population had been involved part-time or full-time in Turkish agriculture.”
“Turkish producer prices for traditional northern agricultural products such as cereals and meats tend to decline after accession. This decline leads to lower agricultural productions and to an increase in domestic consumption, Turkey’s net imports show a tendency to increase. For those products the increase in demand might provide opportunities for EU member states such as Bulgaria, Hungary and Romania. However, other studies indicate that for products — like fruits and vegetables — Turkey has comparative advantages, and the Single European Market will lead to an increase in Turkish fruit and vegetable export to northern European markets.” Another fact underlined in the report says that of the over 3 million agricultural holdings in Turkey over 1 million have an average farm size of less than 2 hectares according to the Turkish Agricultural Census of 2001. “These figures show the high contribution of Turkish agriculture to total employment and the relevance of subsistence production in small agricultural farm holdings which dominate the performance of Turkish agriculture. With the total size of the Turkish agricultural sector the Turkish accession can be compared with the enlargement of the EU-10,” the report says. In drawing conclusions, the report looked at the history of the EU’s newest members. It found that unstable political environments before accession slowed down long-term structural change towards more competitive farm structures. Looking toward 2020, the report says the “structural change process in agriculture is a long-term process that continues with or without policy changes;”
source: Today’s Zaman
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