Neoliberal düzende çiftçilerin ve kooperatiflerin dönüşümü: Konya'da şeker pancarı üretimi örneği

This thesis discusses neoliberal transformations in Turkish agriculture through a case study on sugar beet production in Konya. In contrast to the declining importance of sugar beet production in many rural communities in Turkey, beet cultivation has increased in Konya in the wake of the neoliberal restructuring of the sugar sector in Turkey in the 2000s. This increase is attributed to the ?successful? adjustment of the beet producers? cooperatives in the region to the reforms. This study takes a critical stance toward the role of the cooperatives in such ?successful? cases and discusses the changing role of farmers and cooperatives under the impact of the neoliberal/corporate food regime. On the basis of fieldwork conducted in the Arıkören village in Konya?s Çumra District, I first show how a precarious market structure has turned farming into a form of gambling with deepening commodification and corporatization processes. Second, I discuss the predicaments of farmers who have to operate in new markets. Particularly, my study demonstrates how farmers become ?calculative bodies? who are compelled to be self-managed individuals and risk-bearers under precarious agrarian relations. In such a market setting, I argue that sugar beet production emerges as a new production model that allows farmers to continue producing. In this context, I explore the leading role of the Konya Sugar Processing Company in agro-industry on the basis of this organization?s amalgam structure containing the features of both cooperative and corporation and the contractual relation that it has established with farmers. My study shows that the impacts of neoliberal transformations in agriculture cannot be fully grasped through macro approaches; these transformations create new agricultural relations and that we need ethnographic case studies in order to understand how the formation of new markets impact upon people on the ground.