Chapter 5: Petty commodity production in the neoliberal phase of global capitalism: The case of grape production in Çanakkale

Petty commodity production (PCP) has been the most common form of agricultural production in Turkey. Yet, from 1950s onward, peasant population dwelling in the Turkish countryside kept decreasing due to a number of reasons.¹ First, the spreading of the “green-revolution” to periphery countries and the implementation of Marshall Plan aids affected the structure of agricultural production in 1950s through the labor-displacing features of mechanization (Ecevit, 1999). With the import-substitution development strategy of the 1960s, large amounts of bank loans were allocated to the mechanization of agricultural production. Another momentum of decline in the peasant population dates back to 1980s.² In Turkey, the 1980s represented a radical break from the prior period, proposing an export-oriented production, a diminished role of the state and privatization of state-led enterprises. In other words, in the period following 1980, a wider separation between economics and politics was witnessed in the sense of capturing of the social field through the rationale of market imperatives on the axis of liberalization, privatization, financialization, and deregulation.³ This process, particularly in the agrarian field, resulted in the elimination of state subsidies in the form of price floor policy and input supports, expansion of wholesale purchases for several crops, and suspension of bank loans for peasants. This opened a field of operation for further penetration of local and global capital. From 1980 to 1990, the number of subsidized crops dropped from 20 to 10 (Yenal, 2001) until the crop subsidy program was abolished all together in 2002.