Disappearing onion producers in Karacabey: a micro analysis of farmers and land after structural reform

Abstract

In the last decade, for the first time in Anatolian history, farmers have no longer been the largest working population. The decreasing number of farmers and the shifts in their strategies for agricultural production, employment, livelihood, and market incorporation are a direct result of SAPs of the post-1980 era. This dissetation investigates the multifaceted impacts of structural adjustment reforms, as well as the hardships and the challenging processes that farming families have faced during the last three decades in Turkey. The original contribution is to show ongoing rural transformation in a micro-environment of Bursa Karacabey, by emphasizing what the SAPs mean on the ground. Surveys and statistical data reduce farmers to production units so many goods and services they generate become invisible from a neoliberal perspective. Therefore, here, the challenge is to tease out the political, social, and economic consequences of the SAPs in a micro-environment with special emphasis on the experiences of farmers who are facing impacts of structural reform one-to-one. For the majority of small farmers, SAPs continuously diminish the level of income and farming on its own becomes unable to provide sufficient livelihood for rural dwellers. This dissertation teases out the process of easing away from a strictly agrarian existence and engaging in multiple activities by examining recent trends in rural employment, occupational shifts, changes in the main income sources, emerging economic activities, and spatial relocation in Harmanlı village. It illustrates how rural inhabitants in the village manage their subsistence and overhaul consumption patterns, gender roles, and environment in order to surmount the vicissitudes of structural reform with reference to the political dimensions of livelihood adaptation and relations with the state. In this dissertion, the attention given to real experiences of rural producers instead of statistics enables us to investigate micro-level impacts of SAPs and what kind of coping strategies derive in Harmanlı village. Besides, a comprehensive analysis on livelihood strategies reminds us that resistance to free-market system begins with the mechanisms used by households to preserve subsistence level and social reproduction. Finally, a critical perusal of the rural-urban linkages which are useful lens for understanding the complexities of rural inhabitants’ livelihoods and their coping strategies including some form of mobility, diversification of income sources and occupations, and rural dwellers’ mechanisms of confrontation enriches our analysis in this dissertation.