Structural Adjustment and Peasant Producers: The Political Economy of a Turkish Export Crop

Abstract

The Agricultural Reform Implementation Programme (ARIP), which was adopted under the aegis of a World Bank-financed Structural Adjustment Programme between 2001-2008, aimed to ‘lock in’ the neoliberal hegemony that had been developing in Turkey since the early 1980s by transforming the nation’s agrarian political economy. For hazelnut-producing petty peasant groups of the Black Sea Region, this meant an overall restructuring of their relationship with both the state and (global) capitalist markets. This transformation is evident in the privatization of the parastatal sales cooperative Fiskobirlik and in the price pressures exerted by transnational corporations that purchase Turkey’s vast hazelnut output. Faced with these changes, peasants launched a resistance movement against the implementation of ARIP.