Report: Big fish in agriculture gobbling up the minnows
Posted by meb at March 1st, 2009
Small-scale agricultural enterprises in Turkey are slowly being eliminated while their medium and large-scale counterparts have consolidated, changing the landscape of Turkey’s agricultural considerably, a recently released report says.
“The Agricultural Structure of Turkey Is Changing” report prepared by the Bahçetehir University Center for Economic and Social Research (BETAM) notes a drop from 33.4 percent of Turkish agricultural enterprises operating on an area of less than 20 decares (a measurement used in Norway and former Ottoman territories, including Turkey, equivalent to 1,000 square meters) in 2001 to only 24.8 percent in 2006 The report was compiled by Professor Seyfettin Gürsel, BETAM’s director, and Ulat Karakoç, a BETAM researcher.
Citing Turkish Statistics Institute (TurkStat) figures released last December, the BETAM report noted a general transformation in Turkish agricultural enterprises between 1991 and 2006. This indicated that after 2001, the smallest producers are losing ground in agricultural markets and that medium and large-scale producers are filling the void. The report emphasized that the smallest-scale producers (less than 20 decares) managed to survive until 2001, but have been dropping out of the market since then.
“A parallel development has been a change in the crop pattern. The smallest and the largest enterprises tend toward cultivating fruits instead of traditional field crops,” the report said, adding that total irrigated area had nearly doubled since 2001, a sign of increasing land productivity and continuing technological change.
The expansion of irrigation facilities may have taken the level of mechanization further and rendered crop rotation possible — thus irrigation may be a good proxy for technical change in general. Better irrigation may mean less extensive use of the labor force, fertilizers and chemicals, which implies an increase in land productivity and integration of producers to the markets. The report noted that such facts partly accounted for the increasing size of the seasonal rural labor force in Turkey.
Sharecropping and leasing land are basic characteristics of Turkish agriculture, the report says, noting that TurkStat figures shed light on how this has changed recently. According to this, the percentage of those who only cultivate self-owned land decreased from 92.6 to 85.9 percent between 1991 and 2001, and the decreasing trend has continued since. By 2006, around 30 percent of all agricultural land was leased.
The lease of agricultural land expanded significantly between 1991 and 2001, showing that medium and large-scale enterprises consolidated themselves through leasing land from smaller producers — who have been exiting the sector.
Land fragmentation is accelerating
The report also noted that fragmentation of land parcels was a major structural problem in Turkish agriculture. The percentage of enterprises operating on one to three parcels increased from 43.3 to 56.5 percent of the total between 1991 and 2001. On the contrary, after 2001, this trend was reversed, and land fragmentation decelerated. It showed that the more land big enterprises own, the less land fragmentation there is. While 23.2 percent of all agricultural land was composed of one to three parcels in 1991, this was 40.1 percent in 2001 and 17.5 percent in 2006. However, many farmers still see land possession as a social safety net and thereby tend to lease rather than sell their land, the report added.
Smallest, largest enterprises cultivate fruit
The decreasing prices of traditional field crops like grains, corns and sugar beet seems to have led farmers to switch to more profitable crops, such as fruits. However, only two types of farmers were able to do this: the large enterprises that could afford the investment costs and the smallest ones, for which such an investment could be financed by a small amount of credit. The BETAM report underlines that the regions more suitable for fruit crop cultivation are the regions where the average farm size is smaller.
source: Today’s Zaman
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