Our Agriculture Is Dead and Gone… or Is It?

BY ALP RODOPLU (HIST/V)

The "Turkish Economy for Everyone" seminar series organized by the Department of Economics held this semester's second meeting Wednesday, December 22. Guest speakers Halis Akder and Erol Çakmak, economists from our neighbor Middle East Technical University, discussed the prices of food (especially agricultural products) and agricultural and rural policies. The session continued for almost two hours, during which students had the wonderful and rare opportunity to voice all of the questions they wanted to ask.

Prof. Çakmak, who spoke first, offered attendees an account of the manner in which food prices have been fluctuating in recent decades (specifically, 1980-2000) and how there has been a relative increase in the price of agricultural goods, especially in the last decade. He followed up this account with a discussion concerning the different factors that may be at play in the increases we are observing, especially those in the prices of basic food commodities (i.e. wheat, corn, rice).

Prof. Akder, on the other hand, concentrated on aspects of agricultural and rural policies -- particularly those being pursued in Turkey but with reference to contrasting policies in other regions of the globe -- using what might be called a politico-economic model. His interpretation located different types of policy making along a spectrum, whereby the coordinates of an existing -- or for that matter a hypothetical -- policy are determined by the degree to which it includes both "tarımsal hane-halı için destek" and "tarım işletme desteği."

The audience was naturally dominated by economics students, undergraduate and graduate, but with a considerable number of participants from other departments, including the writer. In any case, the speakers' discussions of alterations in the prices of foodstuffs and the policies by which their production and standards are regulated (or not) provided an appreciably comprehensive picture of contemporary agricultural and rural economics, even for the non-economist.

This is not to say that the presentations were devoid of financial terminology. At times, Prof. Çakmak's remarks occasioned fireworks colored in such terms: market volatility, flexibility, stock-consumption ratio and OECD-FAO conjectures being only a few. But the real reflexes of the "economists" came forth most properly during the discussion period.