Is There a Food Security Risk for Turkey in Near Future? Findings from a Survey of Ninety Villages and Some Policy Implications

In this study, I present the results of the analysis of partial data collected in a research project supported by TUBITAK, along with some socio-economic statistics collected by institutions such as the World Bank, United Nations and TurkStat. The primary data come from a questionnaire carried out through face-to-face interviews with 1424 household heads, who were randomly selected in 90 villages within the administrative borders of 10 provinces accross Turkey in 2009 as part of a research project. The findings indicate that most of the small-sized family farms in Turkey can best be described as a way of employing oneself for their owners, as the families’ members could work on their lands rather than migrating into large cities and looking for already scarce jobs. Indeed, most of these family farms were generally earning very low monthly incomes, in debt, and only able to continue farming activities by financial transfers from their other income resources. Indeed, when the alternative costs of labor of family’s members were taking into account, it did not make any economic sense to keep up farming. It was also found that the size of agricultural land was positively associated with both annual farms incomes and adapted agricultural innovations. Finally, the findings also show that there was ongoing depopulation of young people and an increasingly aging population in rural areas accross Turkey. When these findings are considered together with recent dramatic increases in prices of agricultural inputs, including fuel and fertilizers, as well as some other socio-econpmic indicators, they suggest that Turkey is quite likely to face serious food security problems in the near future.