The role of the IPARD program in rural development and it's evaluation in socio-economic terms: West Mediterranean example

Studies on rural development policies are increasing day by day, both on a global scale and in countries bases. To solve problems on regional development differences and provide equal life standards these policies are applied with different programs in Turkey too. IPARD, a new fund of Turkey, gained at the EU candidate stages. In this study, the implementation process and socio-economic impacts in the rural areas of the IPARD program were investigated, the level of benefiting from the IPARD program, the advantages and disadvantages of the program, the sectoral distribution of the grants and the during the project process problems experienced were tried to be determined. The study was carried out on a total of 452 projects benefiting from the program with full count method, spesific to the provinces of Isparta and Burdur where the program is implemented in the Western Mediterranean region. According to the research findings; the real persons (82%) benefited the most from the support, and the cooperatives the least (1.1%). It has been determined that the average project budget is 605 244.79 TL, the amount of grant support is 309 006.62 TL and 28.8% of the beneficiaries are from different occupational groups other than farmers. It was determined that the measure to improve farm activities (68.3%) in terms of the number of projects and the dairy farming measure (45.3%) in terms of the amount of support were more supported. It was determined that distribution of sectors was related with agricultural potentials of provinces. The supports contribute to the social-economic development, increase the quantity, quality and diversity of production and also decrease the unemployment. The variables, effective in IPARD program applications, are reduced to 3 factors with factor analysis which were "having sectoral knowledge and business", "benefits to be gained from support", "increase in production and modernization". The enterprises benefiting from the supports were defined in 4 clusters by cluster analysis. The enterprises in the 1st cluster were the 16,6% of the total beneficiaries, whereas 23% in the 2nd cluster, 30.5% in the 3rd cluster and 29.9% in the 4th cluster.