Commodification of Global Agrifood Systems and Agro-Ecology

Convergence, Divergence and Beyond in Turkey

Yıldız Atasoy

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2017
• Print ISBN: 9780367595166
• eBook ISBN: 9781136729096
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Business
• Subtopic: Business General
• Index: Business

This book explores the shifting relations of food provisioning in Turkey from a comparative global political economy perspective. It offers in-depth ethnographic analysis, interviews and historical insights into the ambiguities and diversities that simultaneously affect the changing conditions of food and agriculture in Turkey. Specific issues examined include the commodification of land, food and labour; the expansion and deepening of industrial standardization; the expansion of a supermarket model; and concomitant changes in, as well as the simultaneous co-existence of, traditional methods of production and marketing. Contrasting observations are drawn from diverse locales to provide examples of convergence, divergence and cohabitation in relation to transnationally advocated industrial models.

Commodification of Global Agrifood Systems and Agro-Ecology employs a form of comparative perspective that allows the particular processes of restructuring of agrifood relations in Turkey to be simultaneously distinguished from, yet related to, changes taking place in global power dynamics. Y?ld?z Atasoy explores agrifood transformation in Turkey with a unique approach that considers a plurality of intertwined normative influences, ontological beliefs, cultural–religious narratives, political struggles and critical–interpretive positions. Based on original research, the book treats changes in food provisioning as an analytical thread capable of uncovering how the normative acceptability of capitalized agriculture and techno-scientific innovation is entangled with processes of class formation, growing inter-capitalist competition and Islamic politics. Such processes, in turn, frame income/wealth generation, landscape management, agro-ecological dynamics and labour practices, as well as the taste and smell of place.

1Agrifood Systems and Supermarketization

This book examines the structural transformation in Turkey’s food-­provisioning system, including producer–distributor–retailer relationships, from a comparative global political economy perspective. The remaking of agriculture and food in Turkey is taking place through intensified commodification of land, food and labour; the expansion of a supermarket model; and concomitant changes in, as well as the simultaneous co-existence of, traditional methods of production and marketing. This remaking is consistent with what the World Bank (WB), in its 2008 World Development Report, calls a ‘new agriculture for development’ – a policy that advocates the ascendancy of large-scale commercial farmers and a profit-driven orientation in global agriculture (World Bank 2007) tied to national economic growth (Li 2009; McMichael 2009). While the report anticipates a gradual disappearance of small-scale farming, it also encourages the integration of small producers into out-grower schemes as suppliers for large commercial farms through contract farming (White et al. 2012, 625–6). The WB presents a largely linear perspective on the remaking of food and agriculture that posits an inexorable tendency toward commodification. Alternatively, this book offers a systematic presentation of the tensions, ambiguities and diversities that simultaneously affect the changing conditions of food and agriculture in Turkey.

Overall, the WB sees large-scale commercial farming as essential for ­economic growth in the global South. Support for the dominance of large-scale commercialized farmers in the ‘new agriculture’ is typically justified by the assertion that small-scale farming is inherently unproductive and that small producers are incapable of acting as economic agents for sufficiently increased yields (the ‘yield gap’) (de Ponti et al. 2012; FAO 2015; Field Crops Research 2013). It is assumed that the crop ‘yield gap’ between large-scale and small-scale farmers is already large and increasing. This assumption reflects a belief in farmers’ differentiated ability to integrate into more input-intensive production systems, to adopt gap-reducing and productivity-enhancing technologies (i.e. input of soil nutrients, plant genetics and improved crop varieties) and to be responsive to various risk-management issues and environmental constraints. The fundamental criticism levelled at small-scale farmers in relation to the crop yield gap is their general lack of efficiency in achieving higher returns on labour, land and water, according to the rules of economic competitiveness. The yield gap is seen to constitute a general poverty trap for many smallholder farmers. In fact, it is believed that those who cannot increase yields and generate income from agriculture should abandon agriculture altogether.

The structural transformation in food and agriculture does not necessarily mean that governments design rules and policy mechanisms that involve an endless profit-driven pursuit of wealth generation and accumulation through market exchange – a process elaborated by Adam Smith (1991 [1776]) more than 200 years ago. The remaking of food and agriculture not only represents all of these market-oriented changes but also a new value orientation to economization (Brown 2015; Dardot and Laval 2013). This process hinges on the normative activation of economization as a mode of thinking and acting. Economization ‘injects’ food and agriculture with a new ‘value system’ that applies market metrics to the conception/regulation/management of everything in terms of its contribution to economic growth. Such a value system conceives of humans (i.e. farmers) as ‘enterprising subjects’, mobilized to improve their performance values in competition. It also perceives agriculture (and land) as an ‘enterprise entity’ – an instrument and space of competition, the use of which is subject to the systematic pursuit of efficiency. Thus, this book draws in particular from scholarship that focuses on a specific understanding and reasoning of economization in its analysis of the neoliberal nature of agrifood transformation in Turkey.¹ Such reasoning connects individuals, material and normative/discursive resources and relationships, and institutions, into the dominant ‘knowledge structure of political economy’ (Gill 2000), which, in its totality, is conceived as economization. Thus, economization is the knowledge structure of the neoliberal capitalist economy.

A neoliberal remaking of agriculture is expected to reach deep into its political, ethical and moral dimensions in ways that are more significant than the mere institutionalization of market-economic principles in food relationships based on cost–benefit calculations. This remaking requires a normative logic that is capable of integrating economic policy and individual behaviour. Economization signifies that individual activity is entrepreneurial in its very essence. Its value is appreciated and enhanced in the market, as if individuals have always been calculatively engaged in market-based economic relations of competition that filter out winners and losers (Dardot and Laval 2009, 148–91, 264–8). This meaning of neoliberal reasoning and its remaking of subjects, relations and worldviews goes well beyond the expansion of market relations into agriculture. Rather, it encompasses an enduring process of remaking agrifood relationships and a political, normative redeployment through the logic of economization as if the self was a business and individuals were a coherent entrepreneurial unit (Gershon 2011).

The normative account of neoliberalism conceives of economization as a global norm affecting global agriculture by altering the rules of economic behaviour around the competitive principles of a market economy. It anticipates the gradual disappearance of small-scale farming and traditional, customary methods of food provisioning. This account remains an empirical question, given the globally valid conditions of geo-historical diversity and context specificity. It is important to ask if economization is a useful concept for an analysis of the structural transformation that is underway in Turkey’s food-provisioning system. Further, it remains an empirical question, because the normative power of economization does not pre-exist the place-specific and historically bound power dynamics, political struggles and conflicts that reshape the political and cultural conditions of accumulation (Atasoy 2009; 2016). Questions must be asked concerning the shared and divergent perceptions that frame the existing tensions and ambiguities in agrifood relationships in Turkey and may complicate economization as the dominant mode of neoliberal reasoning. As a neoliberal value system, economization is sometimes embraced and sometimes pushed aside, leading to possibilities for commodification in land and food without certainties. Within these possibilities, both old and new ways of thinking co-exist in framing the transition.

The WB’s 2008 report (World Bank 2007, 2) acknowledges that develop­ment trajectories vary in different parts of the world and that there are multiple pathways in the pursuit of a market-oriented agriculture for development. Despite its acknowledgement of global diversity, the report continues to identify ‘development’ in terms of a generalized path for the production of high-value agricultural commodities directed toward global demand. It would seem that the mere existence of diversity in the global economy would be expected to generate more subtle and complicated outcomes than that of a generalized, market-based pathway based solely on efficiency and entrepreneurial fitness in the ‘competitive business’ of farming.

The neoliberal remaking of agriculture and food in Turkey is the central empirical question of this book. It requires us to rethink how normative conformity to a market-oriented model and economization logic is established through geo-historically differentiated considerations of time and place. This in turn allows us to critically examine how agriculture is being reorganized in a way that generates a space within which individual farmers are regarded as neoliberal units of competitive, ‘entrepreneurialized subjects’. Space-making for these neoliberal subjects involves a process that melds a multitude of culturally specific and politically charged issues into a logic of economization (Atasoy forthcoming). Hence, we observe emerging possibilities for uncertain neoliberal complexities. This book shows that the remaking of agrifood relations lies within the process of making a neoliberal history in Turkey and in confrontation with the state-centric developmentalist past, thereby enabling people to ‘sense-make’ within a specific ontological orientation of economization.

We can advance our understanding of the interplay between deepening economization in agriculture and divergent positions, perceptions and practices by being more attentive to the socio-spatial differences in multifaceted relationships, broader histories and discourses. Through my example of Turkey, these relationships are connected to European Union (EU) accession, Ottoman history, the republican state-led developmentalist project, Islamic politics and the recent policies of the ruling Justice and Development Party (AKP). I detail several ways in which the neoliberal remaking of agriculture and food through a competitive economic logic is not exterior, in the Turkish context, to long-held views, religious orientations, policies and struggles that have arisen in the course of cultural, economic confrontations with the developmentalist state. This remaking under the AKP government is attached to the deep structure of the neoliberal global economy and the dominant knowledge mode of economization. Within this attachment, a plurality of normative influences, cultural–religious narratives, political struggles and critical–interpretive positions are simultaneously intertwined to form the substance of a neoliberal condition against the cultural, economic and social fundamentals of statist developmentalism.

The present work endeavours to uncover the uneven processes of ­connectivity that situate locally and regionally scaled variegations within the broader relations of agrifood transformation in Turkey. An analysis of this complexity, with contrasting and complementary examples drawn from various regions of the world, also offers insight into how we might make sense of farmers’ integration into this transformation beyond the currently dominant dualistic perspectives based on market-confirming behaviour. I will show that small-scale producers are neither marginalized relics of the past (cf. Lerner 1958; Rostow 1960) – which constitute shadow markets for subsistence food outside the commercialized relations of capitalist agriculture (cf. Bernstein 1996, 2010) – nor subjects mobilized to form a political force for creating an alternative ontology that challenges the market episteme in agriculture (cf. McMichael 2008). My analysis depicts small producers as a dynamic element in the deepening commodification of agriculture. They partially adopt agro-industrial production methods, gradually embody a normative logic of economization, and act as ‘personal enterprises’ who create alternative ‘niches’ in marketing their food with a taste and place-based claim to its locality. Small producers are players in a particular structural context of neoliberal history-making. A neoliberal condition in agriculture, then, does not generate a pathway that resembles what Paul Collier (2008) calls the ‘Brazilian model’, with its associated changes in the livelihood conditions of smallholders toward large-scale dispossession and displacement from agriculture. A different complexity emerges, one that reflects the twists and turns of both convergence and divergence in regard to neoliberal ways.

Multiple pathways of commercialization exist in Turkish agriculture. What we observe is a diversification in food provisioning whereby smallholders and large-scale producers operate through their own differentiated, but also frequently converging, entrepreneurial practices of land and labour management and integration into globally advocated agro-industrial methods of production. These pathways simultaneously and unevenly converge into the process of commercialization in agriculture. Based on original research (with methodological details to follow later in this chapter), the book uncovers how commercialization is entangled with a diverse set of orientations, standards and practices. Further, the book provides a nuanced examination of agrifood restructuring by revealing the significance of particular local/regional/national/global dynamics of power.

The structural transformation and neoliberal remaking of Turkey’s agriculture and food relationships intersect with broader histories, deeply rooted normative inclinations and long-held ideas about national development and modernization. This does not imply that individuals act as ‘neoliberal subjects’ by acquiring the necessary set of productivity-enhancing skills through training, nor does it suggest that they subscribe to an interest-bound, old liberal-style utilitarian ideational system of cost–benefit calculation to bring about such a change. Rather, this book explores how the interpretative processes of developmentalism enable people to cognitively ‘sense-make’ according to a specific ontological orientation that frames their conformity within the logic of economization and deepening commercialization in food provisioning. It expresses an entirely historical and deeply ‘messy’ phenomenon of turning away from the path of statist-developmentalism that has shaped the particular content of political struggles over inclusion, exclusion, domination and subordination. The main problem in making sense of this messiness lies in the interconnectivity between individual farmers (expressed in their desire to take part in commercialization) and neoliberal restructuring. While neoliberal reasoning allows various farming groups to articulate their position in the social hierarchy of developmentalism as unequally endowed groups, neoliberalization of the economy also enables them to work their way into a more favourable position in the middle class.

The approach presented here brings forth the dynamic interplay between neoliberal subjects/agents and the process of neoliberalization by reference to the economic, political and cultural–religious dimensions [sites] of power. As this power is reconfigured at a historical conjuncture that permits the social hierarchy of developmentalism to be reorganized, the relations and mechanisms of accessing resources are also restructured to allow various groups to reposition themselves in the economy (Atasoy 2009). Thus, the book situates the neoliberal remaking of Turkish food and agriculture within the contingent conjunction of power reconfigurations in a developmentalist social hierarchy. This is important for understanding what a neoliberal conception of change entails in relation to the cultural, normative reconfiguring of social and ecological relationships.

A comprehensive review of the literature on regional diversities and country-specific variations in the remaking of global ag...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half-Title
• Series
• Title
• Copyright
• Dedication
• Contents
• List of Figures
• List of Tables
• Acknowledgements
• 1 Agrifood Systems and Supermarketization
• 2 Breaking from the Past: Changes in Agricultural Land Use
• 3 GlobalGAP and Agro-Biotechnology: Syngenta and Rijk Zwaan in Turkish Villages
• 4 Farming Imaginaries: Convergence, Divergence and Beyond
• 5 The Taste and Smell of Place
• 6 Trust and Trustworthiness: Paternalist Labour Relations in Agriculture
• 7 Supermarkets and Pazars: Divergent Paths
• 8 A Discussion on Diversity
• References
• Index