Browsing by Author "Jongerden, J."

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    Food insecurity in the age of neoliberalism in Turkey and its neighbors
    (Taylor & Francis, 2021) Öztürk, M.; Gür, Faik; Jongerden, J.; International Relations; Mayer, T.; Anderson, M. D.; GÜR, Faik
    Drawing on national and international data sets, we argue in this chapter that food security is weaker in countries and regions where conflict (military unrest, civil war, etc.) and neoliberal agricultural policies coincide, regardless of how powerful their agriculture has been in the past. We contend that while high input prices and liberalized market conditions negatively affect food accessibility much more than production, the production itself is fragile because of high prices of inputs and the cost of waste, transportation, and storage, particularly in a country like Turkey, where small-scale producers dominate agrarian structures. This inevitably transforms food accessibility into a structural problem. Given that putting burdens on small-scale farming triggers rural-to-urban flight and increases unemployment rates and thus poverty, abandoning neoliberal agricultural policies and supporting small-scale farming cannot be considered just an ethical position; on the contrary, it is the solution to the food security issues in Turkey and in the region.
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    The politics of agricultural development in Iraq and the Kurdistan Region in Iraq (KRI)
    (MDPI AG, 2019-11) Jongerden, J.; Wolters, W.; Dijkxhoorn, Y.; Gür, Faik; Öztürk, M.; International Relations; GÜR, Faik
    From being a smallholder-based, food-producing country covering its basic needs, Iraq and the Kurdistan Region in Iraq (KRI) have become major importers of food. The sustainability of the agricultural sector has been systematically undermined by conflict, neglect, and mismanagement, as a result of which the capacity of its farmers to feed the population declined. Even though local policymakers, the international community, and the international organisations emphasise the potential of agriculture for food production, job creation, and income generation, they also tend to consider the current food system problematic because of an alleged low productivity that they relate to the existing smallholder system. For them, such system poses a lack of competences and skills of farmers, and a subsistence production orientation. This approach culminated in a policy-making process that offered land and water for capital investments, and thus neglecting the potentials and competencies of (small-scale) farmers. The concomitant neglect of the human dimension of agriculture, namely the family farm, is essentially the continuation of an economically and ecologically high-risk approach that may lead to a further decline of the sector's ability to produce food for the local market.