The Turkish Association of Chambers of Agriculture Chairman, Semsi Bayraktar: “The growers are the core of this country. There is a population of 81 million, 5 million immigrants and 40 million tourists annually visiting the country and agricultural production is responsible for feeding them all whilst creating employment for nearly 6 million people. It is responsible for 4.5 billion USD of exports and added about 14 billion USD to GDP in 2017. Aricultural is an industry that is never out of style. You can live without plenty of things but not without food. It has been the most strategically important industry through the course of human history.
As a country, we are in a very favorable position in terms of agricultural production potential. We have two of the world’s oldest agricultural production areas in the Anatolia and Thrace regions. We are ranked in the top-10 in production of 55 products. We are the biggest grower in the world in hazelnut, apricot, fig, cherry, quince and hash, second biggest grower in melon, watermelon, honey and leek, third biggest grower in lentils, apple, cucumber, green pepper, green beans, chestnuts, pistachio and strawberry.
The number of endemic plants is above 3,500 in our country whereas it is only 2,500 in the entire European continent.
However there are some structural issues we need to solve in order to fulfil our potential and strengthen our position in the global trade of agricultural products:
1) We have too many small enterprises, the average agricultural company production area size is around 610,000 square feet. This brings a lot of extra costs.
2) Irrigation is an extremely critical issue for us. Right now out of the 900 billion square feet of production area, 2.5 billion can not be properly irrigated due to lack of infrastructure. We also still have not transformed our irrigation systems into the modern automated systems where we can save up to 60 % water used in irrigation.
3) Growers are not organized and do not act together. This lack of organization keeps them from fulfilling their potential. By acting together in organized groups, they could get production materials for less, build cold storage facilities, market products locally and internationally, process them in post-harvest in the most cost-efficient way and plan production in a way to keep supply and demand balance in the market.
4) Chambers of Agriculture around Turkey needs to work more to bring know-how growers in their region. Without increasing the know-how of our growers, no matter what we do, we will not be able to reach the 150 billion USD GDP goal or 40 – 50 billion USD export target.”
Source: Karar