What Farmers Put on the Table: Local Policy Dialogues in Five Provinces

The project holds local policy dialogue meetings with producers, chambers of agriculture and local institutions in Ankara, Adana, İzmir, Sakarya and Şanlıurfa. The meetings follow the stages of production (planning, harvest and marketing); the aim is to turn what farmers report from the field into proposals backed by verifiable data rather than one-off complaints. A few stops, from news items on the project website:

• Yüreğir (Adana), 12 February 2025: Participants discussed how rising prices for diesel, fertiliser, pesticides and seed make planning harder, and how import decisions and the wholesale market system limit farm incomes. A shared observation was that local producers are open to new ideas and information.
• Feke (Adana), 20 February 2025: Participants stressed how fragile farming is: a 10 percent rise in output of a crop can cut its price by up to 50 percent. Poor storage facilities and unplanned imports were also discussed.
• Seyhan (Adana), 14 November 2025: A harvest and marketing meeting discussed prices that stand still while costs rise, and young people leaving farming.
• Şereflikoçhisar (Ankara), 17 January 2026: Faced with worsening drought, participants agreed to prioritise well-timed irrigation, harvest calendars built around water efficiency and drought-tolerant crop patterns in 2026 planning.
• İzmir, 12 September 2026: At a planning and harvest meeting attended by 25 people, olive growers described marketing difficulties, trouble finding workers at harvest time and their wish to mechanise.

The dialogue reached beyond individual farmers. In Feke, members of a women's cooperative (Girişimci Kadınlar Tapaneli Kadın Kooperatifi) discussed lavender production and harvest problems; in Urla, producers' concerns and expectations were presented to the municipality. As announced on 20 January 2025, lavender planting was completed on the pilot fields selected in the five provinces.

The results of these meetings fed into the project's Agricultural Policy Monitoring Report for the 2025 production year, which states that its assessment of producers' problems is based on meetings and fieldwork in the five provinces. The findings were also brought together in the Anatolian Farmers' Council's national review.