What does the leasing of agricultural land mean?

On August 22, 2024, the “Regulation on the Leasing of Uncultivated Agricultural Land for Agricultural Purposes” was published in the Official Gazette.

Those living in cities likely do not know the root cause of this regulation.

What is the Root Cause of the Regulation?

Let’s rewind the film a bit.

With the neoliberal policies implemented following the September 12, 1980 military coup, support policies for small and medium-sized enterprises based on family labor began to be abandoned in peripheral countries. The peasantry was subjected to a process of dispossession, and initiatives were accelerated to transform these enterprises into giant capitalist enterprises, or in other words, corporate farming.

There were three reasons for these externally dependent agricultural policies in terms of the interests of central countries.

The first was to deplete the existing stocks of agricultural products in their hands. To this end, they lowered World Exchange Prices below those of peripheral countries and engaged in dumping, but while doing so, they took every measure to protect their own domestic markets. The second was to make peripheral countries dependent in terms of food sovereignty by collapsing their agriculture, and the third was to make it easier to purchase agricultural lands in peripheral countries that had been converted to corporate farming.

As for domestic policy, brains were washed regarding the idea that productivity was low in small and medium-sized enterprises based on family labor. Corporate farming was promoted through the liquidation of the peasantry for the sake of increasing total agricultural production. As a result, not only did agricultural production not increase, but farmers in rural areas who could not earn money became unable to cultivate their land.

In this way, the reduction of the rural population was also brought to the agenda.

In 2003, Article 75 of the Village Law, which prevented “foreigners from purchasing land,” was also repealed by the AKP.

What Will Happen with the Regulation?

Let’s come to the present day. The issued regulation is based on the “Law on Amendments to the Forest Law and Certain Other Laws,” which was published in the Official Gazette on March 23, 2023.

With this regulation, small farmers will be forced to abandon their land; on the other hand, a leasing process will be carried out as an infrastructure for seizing the lands of peasants who have not left the village and have not sold their agricultural land, but who cannot cultivate the land because they are making a loss.

Let alone corporate farming becoming dominant with this regulation, there is a possibility that foreigners who can become citizens and/or who are partners with many large companies of Turkish origin could seize agricultural land.

In short, with this regulation, corporate farming, which is a product of the capitalist paradigm, is intended to be made dominant, to put it mildly.

What Could the Future Hold with Corporate Farming, a Product of the Capitalist Paradigm?

The first question is: Is it possible to increase production and efficiency through giant domestic or foreign-partnered corporate enterprises and the contract farming model, which are encouraged to be established instead of small and medium-sized enterprises based on family labor in third-world countries?

The answer to this has become clear; as in other third-world countries, agricultural production per capita has not increased in Turkey, and the country has clearly become an importer of agricultural products.

A second question, at least as important as the first, is this: Is there work in the cities for the approximately three billion people who will be left out of work due to the liquidation of the peasantry?

Samir Amin answers this question as follows(*):

“…Even if a visionary hypothesis such as a continuous 7 percent annual growth rate were to be realized (in the world) over a fifty-year period, it would not be able to absorb even one-third of this reserve (i.e., the three billion people coming to the cities). In other words, by its very nature, capitalism cannot solve the peasant problem, and the only perspective it offers is a world of shantytowns and five billion surplus people.”

Economist Korkut Boratav also says the following about Amin’s view(**):

“I think this disaster scenario should be taken into account, even if it seems exaggerated at first glance. However, it should be remembered that for such a transformation to take place, three prerequisites must be completed in Third World Agriculture: Full opening to the import of metropolitan agricultural products based on extraordinary subsidies; an end to all subsidies and public interventions in national agricultural markets; and unlimited commodification of agricultural land, that is, freedom of buying and selling for foreign capital.”

I would also like to state:

“These three prerequisites are being imposed on third-world countries; in other words, Amin’s negative scenario is being realized. However, the writing is on the wall: industrial agriculture, where corporate farming is generally dominant, is not enough to feed humanity and provide employment. Let alone the tragedy experienced in Africa, the appearances in both rural and urban areas in Turkey have emerged as the most concrete indicators of this. In this sense, industrial agriculture primarily shapes the impoverishment observed in third-world countries and the crisis experienced by largely disintegrating peasant societies. However, this situation that has emerged is not independent of the crisis experienced in northern countries either.”

In summary:

“Agricultural production should be carried out on the basis of the economic organization of small and medium-sized peasant enterprises, and a non-capitalist path should be followed against the dominance of corporate farming. In the final analysis, it is observed that capitalism, characterized as a so-called free market reduced to a lawless state, has created an unprecedented inequality in income distribution through the north-south contradiction.

As a result of this situation, on the one hand, migrations have emerged, and on the other, the geopolitical tensions created have brought military conflicts to the agenda. If a new alternative to capitalism cannot be created, 'the emergence of a negative, chaotic environment for humanity will be an inevitable future,'” I say.

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(*)Samir Amin, 2008. “Editor” Peasant and Worker Struggles in the Face of 21st Century Challenges, 2008. Özgür Üniversite Publications.

(**)Korkut Boratav, 2009. Agricultural Prices, Employment and the Fate of the Peasantry. 2009 Mülkiye Spring, Volume 33