The global implementation of market-oriented policies is remaking ecosystems and livelihoods. Transformations are especially significant for agricultural biodiversity, the part of biological diversity related to food and agriculture, which is maintained in farmers' fields in the form of landraces. For almost 10,000 years farmers in Turkey have relied on and maintained wheat landraces to adapt to socio-economic and environmental changes. However, extensive political and economic transformations in Turkey since the late 1990s are beginning to affect farmers in ways that threaten biodiversity of wheat. These transformations derive from a general process of neoliberal reform, and commitments to various international organizations, including the World Bank, International Monetary Fund, World Trade Organization, and especially the European Union. This doctoral dissertation research project explores the linkages and articulation between neoliberalism, the state and agricultural biodiversity. The project asks three primary questions: 1) What is the role of the Turkish state in articulation of neoliberal agricultural policies and conservation of agricultural biodiversity? 2) How will recent agricultural policies affect access to and distribution of crop genetic resources? 3) How do farmers respond to current legislative and agricultural policy changes, especially to those that directly affect the grains and seed sector? The investigators will identify the goals and the articulation of the state's policies on agriculture through analysis of 1) documents on agriculture produced by the state and by international organizations, and 2) semi-structured interviews with state officials and international experts. The project will also include local ethnographies at two separate research sites in Turkey, in northwestern and central Anatolia, to understand responses of farmers and farmers' organizations to changes in agriculture.
This project on how state projects of neoliberalism affect farmers' ability to grow and maintain wheat landraces makes multiple contributions. In terms of theoretical advances, the research brings together scholarship on the neoliberal state and on agricultural biodiversity. In so doing, the project will broaden and deepen understanding of the relationship between neoliberalism and nature. In terms of practical advances, the results will offer theoretical, empirical and practical insights that will provide important and timely data to state, non-governmental, and farmers' organizations, which can be used for formulation of in situ conservation policies. Turkey is the only country in the Middle East region that as a collaborator of an international program develops disease-resistant and high-yielding winter wheat varieties and distributes them internationally. Therefore, understanding linkages between neoliberalism and agricultural biodiversity in Turkey has potential implications for food security and crop improvement, for not only Turkey and the Middle East, but the world in general. As a Doctoral Dissertation Research Improvement award, this award also will provide support to enable a promising student to establish a strong independent research career.
