Agricultural Transformation in Contemporary Turkey

This study analyses the agricultural restructuring processes in Turkey focusing on the first decade of the 2000s. It argues that the agricultural restructuring processes entailed a three dimensional commodification process, namely commodification of land, subsistence and labour-power of the peasantry. In order to grasp the agricultural restructuring process, this work follows the interpretation of the concept of primitive accumulation as the constitutive basis of the capital-relation. The analysis shows that the restructuring of agriculture amounted to a political practice of government. However, in contrast to the classical example of primitive accumulation that Marx analysed, the Turkish state did not intervene directly. Rather, it governed through the market. In Turkey, the establishment of the market as the formative power of economy goes back to the early 1980s when the country experienced a change in development strategy from import substitution industrialisation to export-oriented growth model, which entailed marketisation as practice of government, at the expense of state-led development. In the 1980s, this change towards the market was supported by military dictatorship. The study places the restructuring of Turkish agriculture in the context of market-based processes of restructuring from the 1980s onwards.