Evaluation of the Turkish agricultural sector for sustainable food security: Data envelopment analysis

The agricultural sector is important due to its ability to meet the basic needs of human beings such as nutrition. The increasing world population has raised the nutritional problem of human beings, and this has been tried to overcome with the use of modern inputs, technological development, and mechanization in the agricultural sector. While this process brought high productivity increases in agricultural production, it also caused environmental problems and access to healthy food. The issue of food security has been brought to the agenda in order to reduce the negative effects of the developments on food. Food security is defined as the constant access to adequate, healthy, reliable and nutritious food in order to meet the nutritional and food needs of people for their lives. In this study, first of all, self-sufficiency in agricultural products was examined in order to evaluate the Turkish agriculture sector in terms of food security. Then, the annual calorie requirements of the population of the country were calculated and the rates of meeting the calorie requirement of agricultural production were found. Finally, DEA Turkey's using the method of OECD sustainable food security in terms of relative activity was examined. Given the findings of the study, it is seen that Turkey is in a good position in terms of food availability, but the same thing can not be said for difficulties in terms of accessibility.