Barış Can Sever - Can human-scale agriculture make Anatolia a breadbasket again?

This month we are delighted to be joined by Barış Can Sever who is Ph.D. candidate at the Department of Sociology at Middle East Technical University, Ankara, Turkey. He is currently doing a 9-month research period at Global Development Studies at the University of Helsinki. Barış gives us an exciting insight into the agricultural geography in Turkey, including pressure from changing socio/ecological systems and the increasing dependency on imports. There have been dramatic changes in the country’s rural areas over the last 40 years, including the entrance of transnational corporations into the rural spaces and significant rural out migration. When analyzing the migration patterns, Barış is looking at more than just linear stories, but rather he looks at the relationality and overarching forces that reproduce injustices and inequality, which channels people into certain patterns. He gives us insight into the extractivist logics at play and what human scale agriculture could look like in the context of building a functioning and sustainable Anatolian countryside. 

Interested to check out more of Barış’ work? https://www.researchgate.net/profile/Baris-Can-Sever