Introduction
Our region ranks number one in export-cherry production in the country. Since most of our producers are smallholders, I congratulate them for their success. We have developed projects, offered training and subsidies to our producers so that we can export high-quality cherries to the rest of the world. If we can manage to form a united cherry frontier, with the cooperation of our state, smallholders, and exporters, then success will be ours (Administrator at Manisa Provincial Directorate of Food, Agriculture and Livestock, October 11, 2021).
On the 100th anniversary of our Republic, we exported 83,000 tons of cherry and received 215 million dollars in return. We want to make a successful start to the second century of our Republic. We are by far the world leader in cherry production with a yield of 725,000 tons, and we are among the top four countries in the world in exports. We aim to be among the top three countries in the coming year (President of the Aegean Fresh Fruit and Vegetable Exporters’ Association, April 13, 2024).
These celebratory remarks reflect how various actors involved in Turkey’s export cherry production view the fruit as a symbol of national pride through economic development. At the center of this vision is a powerful agrarian imaginary of the “united cherry frontier” as a space where smallholders, exporters, and the state are portrayed as working in harmony to produce a globally competitive, high-quality commodity.
This paper examines the making of this “united export-cherry frontier” in western Turkey. I use the concept of the “commodity frontier” (Moore Reference Moore2000) to refer to the socially produced spaces of export-oriented agriculture where political–economic practices, culture, and ecology co-constitute each other, often through political battles that forge new moral claims (Mitchell Reference Mitchell, MacKenzie, Muniesa and Siu2007). This approach allows for a critical inquiry into capitalist expansion and the unevenness that unfolds across scales. Echoing recent calls to recognize the cultural and institutional factors shaping political economies (Christophers Reference Christophers2014; Langley Reference Langley2020; Peck Reference Peck2012), I demonstrate that articulation with and disarticulation from global commodity chains not only drive uneven capitalist expansion but also shape social differentiation and political contestation at the local level.
Focusing on a microclimatic peri-urban area in Şehzadeler, Manisa, known for its competitive advantage due to earlier cherry harvesting and higher market prices, I show the historical continuity between the disarticulation of the said area from global tobacco commodity chains by the early 2000s, followed by its re-articulation with global sweet cherry production networks. I call this area, which hosts six villages to the southeast of the town of Şehzadeler, the “Şehzadeler cherry frontier” (see Figure 1). At the Şehzadeler cherry frontier, sweet cherry production forms a production node where local processes and resources are incorporated into the global cherry circuits.
Villages that form the Şehzadeler sweet cherry frontier (circled).
A key actor shaping this production node is the main international corporate actor in the Şehzadeler frontier, hereafter referred to as “the Company” for purposes of anonymity. Acting as both a large-scale producer and an exporter that organized fragmented smallholders, the Company’s model was an early example of the type of vertically integrated structure that state policies have since promoted, despite its reliance on contingent, often oral, contracts contrasting with the formal, regulated system envisioned by the state. This pattern was not unique to cherries. Similar turns toward contract farming amid weak producer organization were evident in other emerging high-value fresh produce sectors of the period, such as pomegranates (Karacadağ Kalkınma Ajansı 2011) and fresh apricots (Fırat Kalkınma Ajansı 2010; Malatya Ticaret Borsası 2014).
The emergence of the Şehzadeler cherry frontier is best understood with an extended case method approach (Burawoy Reference Burawoy1998), because it serves both as a generalizable example of the broader neoliberal restructuring of Turkish agriculture and a singular event whose unique characteristics allow for theoretical reconstruction. The generalizable dimension is seen in the broader neoliberal restructuring of agriculture, a process that has reduced the autonomy of smallholders and turned them into de facto laborers on their own land.Footnote 1
However, as Burawoy (Reference Burawoy1998) argues, the scientific contribution of a case study lies in using its singular aspects to elaborate existing theory. The formation of this cherry frontier is unique, shaped by a distinct mix of three factors: the ecological challenge of exporting a perishable, early-variety fruit; a history of politically driven infrastructure projects in the district; and ideological appeals to nationalism made by state and corporate actors to secure smallholder consent. This combination created what state authorities and capital consider a policy success today, as the cherry frontier achieved their goals of consolidating production and boosting high-value exports within an agribusiness framework. The case therefore offers a critical opportunity to understand how agrarian capitalism expands through the complex interplay of state power, the party politics of the ruling Justice and Development Party (AKP), and the nationalist–religious ideology that underpins its model of neoliberal statism.
To analyze smallholders within the cherry frontier, I adopt the term “united cherry frontier,” a phrase borrowed from the agricultural bureaucrat quoted above that fortuitously resonates with Moore’s (Reference Moore2000) concept of the commodity frontier. The “united cherry frontier” is both an agrarian imagery and a produced material landscape configured by the efforts of various actors, including governmental bodies, exporters, smallholders, and seasonal farm workers. However, the variegated agency of these actors in export-cherry production, along with their differing political interests, perceptions, and conflicting economic objectives, render the frontier a competitive and turbulent space. Far from a unified, predictable, and manageable environment, the cherry frontier is defined by economic and political tensions and a myriad of intrigues and discordant opinions, all of which are premised on the materiality of the cherry and the political economy of what falls within a highly informal global production network. This raises a central question: Given that the benefits of large-scale export agriculture are seized almost solely by larger actors who are exporters, how do both the state (regional governance units) and private capital (exporters) demand and succeed in garnering the support of small and large farmers alike?
As the opening vignettes highlight, agricultural governance bodies view smallholder integration with the global cherry commodity chains as essential for successful production and export of high-quality cherries. In fact, the governance bodies encourage dutiful contribution to the expansion of the cherry frontier as a matter of national service. On one hand, the governance goal of integrating smallholders into export-cherry production is not surprising as smallholders constitute the majority of cherry producers in the region. On the other hand, local smallholders’ need for fair prices and greater bargaining power vis-à-vis the exporters is left largely unaddressed by the same governance bodies that invite smallholders to “unite” with their exploiters (i.e. cherry exporting agribusinesses) to export “Turkish” cherries to global markets. At first glance, the expectation that small-scale cherry producers should unite with the state and capital around the goal of maximizing the frontier’s cherry export is riven with contradictions. Nevertheless, local small-scale producers do not consider quitting cherry production given the current exporter-dominated production pattern. In fact, all but a couple of small-size cherry producers I interviewed indicated their conviction that they should continue cherry production.
To disentangle these seemingly contradictory forces, and to offer an accurate profile for small-scale cherry producers, I investigate why smallholders’ participation in, and discursive support for, export-cherry value chains persist despite their far-from-ideal conditions. What happens when private capital replaces state actors in linking smallholders to export markets during transition from classical export commodities to high-value crop production? How is a consensus reached to participate in the united cherry frontier by smallholders and larger actors alike? How are the material inequalities of the frontier obscured by the spectacle of development? Consequently, how is the “united cherry frontier” made into an edifice of national pride that demands sacrifice from smallholders? And finally, how could understanding the current smallholder position in the cherry frontier inform our perception of uneven development as a complex totality?
Drawing on participant observation during three harvest seasons as well as interviews and focus groups conducted with smallholders (n = 42), entrepreneurs (n = 10), exporters (n = 6), bureaucrats (n = 13), and members of the municipal council (n = 8) in Şehzadeler between 2019 and 2022, the paper answers these pressing questions to highlight how space, local agrarian relations, and their political and ideological underpinnings as well as materiality (the commodity itself) converge to constitute a niche commodity frontier.
Theoretical framework
I deploy two key theoretical tools that jointly underpin the central concept of frontier: the dialectical theory of the production of space and nature (Smith Reference Smith1984); and the disarticulation perspective (Bair and Werner Reference Bair and Werner2011). Together, these complementary frameworks provide a critical and historicized lens for understanding how capital reshapes rural geographies in uneven and contingent ways.
In The Limits to Capital, Harvey (Reference Harvey1982) identified spatial uneven development as a structural characteristic of a crisis-prone capitalist order. The production of space under capitalist relations continually requires new frontiers for expansion while simultaneously demanding territorial reconfigurations such as infrastructures that fix capital in place. Harvey’s concept of the spatial fix refers to the restructuring of the spatial economy through investment in the built environment, temporarily displacing crises (Ekers Reference Ekers2015; Schoenberger Reference Schoenberger2004). This dynamic necessitates the continual remaking of place over time (Hudson Reference Hudson, Lang, Henn, Sgibnev and Ehrlich2015).
Building on this, Neil Smith’s (Reference Smith1984) landmark Uneven Development showed that capitalist accumulation is inherently a spatial and ecological project. His “seesaw theory” explains how capital migrates to new spaces and abandons others but returns once profitability can be restored. In this dialectical framework, the production of space and nature are internal to one another. The seesaw dynamic illustrates the generalization of capitalist relations while simultaneously producing differentiated spaces and socio-natures across scales and historical conjunctures.
However, as Hudson (Reference Hudson, Lang, Henn, Sgibnev and Ehrlich2015, 30) observes, Smith’s theory remains “clunky” in that it provides little clarity on which places experience which kinds of development trajectories, when, and why. Smith (Reference Smith1984) seldom historicized his ideas empirically in Uneven Development. This is where the disarticulation perspective offers explanatory power, focusing on the historical and empirical dimensions of capitalist development and emphasizing the “disinvestment and other forms of disconnection of people and places from global production networks” (McGrath Reference McGrath2018, 517).
The dis/articulation approach was proposed by Bair and Werner (Reference Bair and Werner2011) who noticed the “inclusionary bias” in the global commodity-chain literature. The term essentially refers to the literature’s tendency to focus only on success stories of regional integration into a certain global commodity chain. This approach leaves out the exclusion of certain places and people as part and parcel of capital’s movements across spaces and scales. Delinking excludes people and places from circuits of capital accumulation in ways that may be important for their later incorporation (if it ever happens) into new chains and circuits of accumulation. Werner (Reference Werner2022, 1395) puts the theory of dis/articulation in historical perspective by reminding us that the “process of exclusion in one region [is] clearly part of a longue durée of peripheralization.”
Together, these two frameworks, i.e. production of space and nature and the dis/articulations approach, enable critical and historicized insights into the making/unmaking of “transient uneven geographies of global production” (Traub-Werner and Cravey Reference Traub-Werner and Cravey2002). The notion of articulation – understood as the joining together of structures of power like free-trade, capitalism, and nationalist–religious ideology – is particularly helpful in paying attention to contingency, while maintaining a commitment to structural analysis.
Based on this theoretical framework, the next section provides the historical context for the emergence of the sweet cherry frontier. Specifically, I trace the restructuring of agrarian production in western Turkey to illustrate how capital shapes and is shaped by new commodity frontiers. The discussion that follows presents an empirical account of the export-cherry frontier, linking uneven development to the political and cultural economy of smallholder agriculture.
Findings and discussion
On restructuring, regional disinvestment, and reinvestment: from tobacco to high-value sweet cherries
Between 1923 and 1962, Turkey’s economic development strategy emphasized agricultural growth to supply raw materials for domestic manufacturing. From 1962 to 1983, the country pursued an import substitution industrialization (ISI) model, relying on domestic consumption and state-regulated trade (Akçay and Türel Reference Akçay, Türel, Özçelik and Özdemir2022). This shifted in the early 1980s as Turkey liberalized its economy, significantly reducing agricultural subsidies and curtailing the public sector’s role (Öniş Reference Öniş1991). While election periods saw temporary reversals through populist farm subsidies, the overall trajectory from the 1994 and 2001 crises remained oriented toward liberalization. Although the 2001 Agricultural Reform and Implementation Programme (ARIP) reforms were partially diluted by government attempts to maintain political support (Akder Reference Akder2007), they nonetheless ushered in significant dismantling of agricultural support systems and privatization of state-owned enterprises (Aydın Reference Aydın2010).
ARIP, launched in 2001 with World Bank financing, became the cornerstone of agricultural restructuring. Its aims were fiscal stabilization and the removal of “market distortions” by abolishing state subsidies and guaranteed prices (World Bank Group 2001). Central to this was replacing subsidized pricing with a direct income support (DIS) system, which provided payments directly to farmers based on land ownership and required formal land titles (World Bank Group 2009). The World Bank projected that these reforms would encourage better-resourced farmers to switch to more profitable crops, while less-resourced smallholders, many lacking formal land titles, would be forced to leave agriculture altogether (World Bank Group 2001).
However, because the DIS system allocated payments solely based on land size and required formal land titles, it disproportionately benefited wealthy landowners and contributed to the exclusion and weakening of many smallholders from competitive participation in the emerging market economy, deepening rural class inequalities (İslamoğlu Reference İslamoğlu, Adaman, Akbulut and Arsel2017). Many small family farms, lacking formal land documentation due to fragmented or customary tenure, found themselves structurally disempowered within the new regime of agricultural production and market relations (İslamoğlu Reference İslamoğlu, Adaman, Akbulut and Arsel2017; Keyder and Yenal Reference Keyder and Yenal2011).
In Turkey’s Aegean region, ARIP’s second component hastened the abandonment of traditional cash crops such as tobacco.Footnote 2 A World Bank Group (2002) report explicitly identified crops like hazelnut and tobacco as over-supported and encouraged their replacement. Yet alternative crop projects under ARIP were directed only at southeastern and eastern provinces (Akder Reference Akder2007; Kayaalp Reference Kayaalp2014), leaving western tobacco producers unsupported. Between 2002 and 2006, contract farming replaced state procurement, and most tobacco-growing households in the west were pushed toward off-farm labor (Kayaalp Reference Kayaalp2009a, Reference Kayaalp2009b).
An extensive qualitative study of tobacco farmers in the western provinces by İslamoğlu et al. (Reference İslamoğlu, Gülöksüz, Kaya, Çavdar, Karakoç, Nizam and Yazıcı2008) found that most who remained in agriculture after tobacco’s decline were upper middle-class rural families (village elites) with diverse income sources. Over half of the 715 farmers interviewed in the Aegean region had amassed significant wealth during the pre-1980 import substitution period (İslamoğlu et al. Reference İslamoğlu, Gülöksüz, Kaya, Çavdar, Karakoç, Nizam and Yazıcı2008). Having produced export crops such as cotton, tobacco, and grapes for state enterprises, these farmers accumulated the resources – land, capital, and time – to invest in the next lucrative export crop. Consequently, they shifted toward export-oriented fresh fruit production (Keyder and Yenal Reference Keyder and Yenal2011).
By the mid-2000s, the restructuring had clearly reshaped social relations within the rural population at the frontier, producing pronounced class-based inequalities and differentiated livelihood strategies. ARIP neglected the specific ecological and economic conditions of small tobacco growers, especially in the highlands of Manisa, where tobacco had been ideal due to its low irrigation needs. With few viable alternatives, highlanders were forced to migrate seasonally to lowland areas for agricultural work, effectively disarticulated from global tobacco chains and pushed into precarious labor.
The villages that now make up the Şehzadeler cherry frontier transitioned to cherry production in response to growing European demand in the early 2000s. Simultaneously, increasing rural–urban integration created new livelihood possibilities. Off-farm work and property investments enabled smallholders to diversify income sources. Municipal re-zoning of villages also facilitated agricultural land conversion. Today, many small-scale cherry producers in Şehzadeler own multiple properties in both village and urban centers such as İzmir and Manisa. They typically reside in cities during the off-season and return for the cherry harvest. These multi-sited households, with income from remittances, pensions, and wage labor, illustrate the complex interplay between rural and urban economies in Şehzadeler.
Smallholders (less than ten dönüms) comprised around 95 percent of the cherry producers in Şehzadeler and began by planting rootstocks grafted with export varieties. Most sold their cherries to a single agribusiness that specialized in exports and maintained a 600-dönüm orchard. Alongside these smallholders, a handful of medium-scale producers (100 to 150 dönüms), who had prospered in tobacco, cotton, and grape exports during the ISI period, invested early in cherry orchards, leveraging their accumulated capital.
The Company was founded by a Turkish horticulturist and expanded into cherry exports in the 1990s. It was acquired in 2011 by a major global fresh produce supplier. Most producers supply the Company through oral and informal contract farming arrangements. Over time, socio-economic divergence widened: smallholders became increasingly dependent on buyers, while medium-scale growers accumulated wealth, urban assets, and political influence. Thus, Şehzadeler’s agricultural reorganization reinforced existing class distinctions. This new class structure also shaped attempts at collective organization; farmer-led groups, like the Şehzadeler Cherry Producers’ Union (CPU), were formed but ultimately co-opted by village elites, failing to represent smallholder interests. The 2001 restructuring had disarticulated the region from global tobacco markets, expelling many smallholders and rechanneling others into cherry production under these new, challenging contract farming regimes.
The shift from tobacco to cherry production in Şehzadeler illustrates how disarticulation and the spatial fix work together. As global demand for cherries rose, the region that was previously disconnected from state-led global production networks became a target for reinvestment and reintegration through export-oriented agriculture, catalyzing a new commodity frontier. Yet, this reinvestment was guided by contingent contract frameworks controlled by a single Company, producing differentiated trajectories for smallholders versus medium-scale growers. The expansion depended on broader changes such as improved rural transport, shifts in land use, and export-oriented logistics, entangling public infrastructure with private sector-led agricultural investment. As such, the region became rearticulated from a former tobacco periphery into an export-oriented cherry corridor, marked by uneven returns and a clash between small-scale autonomy and agribusiness power. This underscores how capital’s productive and discursive moves selectively shape place-based outcomes, even when frontiers appear to open broadly at first glance.
While initial contracts improved livelihoods and fostered a shared sense of development among cherry producers, by the mid-2000s the Company consolidated its control and domination. The production regime shifted from cooperative to hierarchical, reducing farmer autonomy and deepening agribusiness dominance.
Making of the Turkish cherry
We started to look for opportunities globally. Since there is high demand for our product in the global market, we asked ourselves: What can we do to compete worldwide? Or can we do even better and outperform the rest of the world? Yet the biggest problem we had to face was a highly fragmented production.
We treat all our producers like a family member. We attend their weddings and memorials. As you know, if a family works towards the same goal, failure is not an option because power stems from unity. Together we will carry our country to the top of the list in global cherry exports (The Company’s Founder, April 8, 2022).
The reduction of state involvement in supporting and marketing agricultural production paved the way for capital-intensive high-value agriculture in Şehzadeler, foregrounding national agrarian capital as the most powerful actor linking producers to export markets. In the year 2000, the Company established an early-variety cherry orchard in Sancaklıbozköy, a village located in the town of Şehzadeler. The business plan was to expand production by establishing a form of contract-farming scheme since enlarging and consolidating land to create larger holdings had not been possible in the region.
To meet export standards shaped by powerful transnational grocery retailers, the Company invested in quality-enforcing strategies, training local producers through its consultants. However, the terms of this mutual agreement were never put down on paper. Small-scale farmers would invest in planting cherry trees and wait for three to four years to see the trees bearing fruit. After making such an investment, farmers’ power to negotiate was already weakened against the only buyer in the area. This production scheme reduced formerly independent farmers to laborers on their own land while allowing the Company to subcontract cherry production at minimal cost and off-load production risks onto the producer. This production plan engendered new social and spatial differentiation dynamics as the Company assumed the status of national capital linking producers with global cherry markets even though it played an important role alongside and later in joint ventures with global capital.Footnote 3
While state involvement in scientific research and development had been instrumental for the small farmers of the frontier to access export varieties,Footnote 4 the broader post-ARIP policy environment promoted a market-oriented rural development strategy, favoring land consolidation for large-scale farming despite not fully achieving this goal. Nevertheless, this approach caused smallholders to lose out on state support. Consequently, smallholders who could afford to stay active in agriculture despite limited or no state support continued their search for profitable cash crops, such as cherries. Further, the changing dynamics of state-led “development”Footnote 5 facilitated land use conversion from agricultural to residential or infrastructural, enabling local communities of the cherry frontier to commute to nearby city centers to access income sources outside of agriculture. As such, these families not only managed to “hold out on selling land” and maintain their smallholdings, but they also evolved into entrepreneurial farmers with diversified income streams (Öztürk et al. Reference Öztürk, Jongerden and Hilton2014, 352). Withdrawal of effective state involvement in organizing agriculture enabled export-oriented national capital to dominate production and integrate the remaining small farmers in the area into it as contractual producers.
Şehzadeler as an early cherry variety zone
For any fruit trader who wants to enter international markets beyond the EU [European Union], opening their sales with cherries is indicative of prestige. Even if they do not profit from their investment in the cherry trade, they still stay in the cherry market because early-season cherries are the first fruit of the year, so they are viewed almost like a ticket to the international fruit market … You want to be there when the show begins, right? (Fruit Exporter in Manisa, May 29, 2019).
Among the production arrangements established across three provinces by the Company (in Manisa, Çanakkale, and Eskişehir), Şehzadeler (Manisa) stands out as an illustrative case where smallholders remain trapped in a race to the bottom. This is essentially due to the Company’s designation of this location as a zone for early-harvest cherries.
Early cherry varieties in Turkey are produced only in the microclimatic landscape between Kemalpaşa (İzmir) and Şehzadeler (Manisa). On the other hand, 0900 Ziraat, the most widely cultivated and exported variety of Anatolian origin,Footnote 6 does not suit Şehzadeler’s environmental conditions all that well. With low altitude and a mild climate, it is impossible to provide 0900 Ziraat with the number of chilling hours it requires. So, Şehzadeler’s cherry producers use hydrogen cyanamide that breaks the tree’s dormancy early, allowing for early harvest. Yet, excessive use of hydrogen cyanamide also dries up the tree in about eight to ten years, whereas the average productive life of a cherry tree on the highlands is thirty to thirty-five years. While the producers are economically challenged by the shortened lifespan of their trees due to the use of chemicals for early maturity, they cannot risk producing a different variety unknown to the international markets. As such, producers in Şehzadeler are trapped in a path-dependent race to exploit not only their own labor but also nature.
With the state-centered development schemes replaced by niche supply chains governed by private capital, smallholders of Şehzadeler have been left with no choice but to continue input-heavy, intensive cherry production. In addition, the first earnings of the season come in cash during the cherry harvest – late April or early May. While highlighting the informal character of the local cherry market, exchanging cherries for cash allows smallholders to pay off their debts with the “cherry money” or make new investments (Smallholder Focus Group 2022, personal communication). Contrary to common belief, most smallholders at the frontier do not use family labor during harvest (n = 35). Rather they compete with medium- to large-scale producers for harvest labor, driving up labor costs. The cumulative outcome of these conditions is exacerbated by the perishability of sweet cherries and the buyers’ manipulation of quality standards as a pretext to reduce cherry prices, leaving smallholders with little to no bargaining power during the competitive, brief, and fast-paced cherry harvest season.
Smallholders as price-takers in the local marketplace
The cherry marketplace was referred to as the “devil’s playground” by most small-scale producers. The devil, being the buyers, has the power of setting the price for cherries as the small producers could not manage to unite and challenge the power dynamics in the local cherry market. Further, small-scale cherry producers lacked access to infrastructural facilities such as cold storage, which means they rush to the marketplace to sell their cherries before the fruit spoils. This compels the small cherry producers to undersell their cherries.
Ultimately, small producers are forced to accept prices that barely cover their costs, or ensure them a livelihood, in the highly informal space of the marketplace. Dealing with small producers outside the confines of a formal, legally binding contract gives export-buyers the upper hand, enabling them to obtain the price flexibility they need to stay competitive in the global market. Since the quality of supplied cherries is of prime importance for exporters, they want to be able to reject poor-quality cherries that might result from unpredictable and unpreventable climate-related or other ecological risks. Since the cherries are grown predominantly by small-scale producers in Şehzadeler, exporters easily diversify their purchases in whatever quantity they see fit. Making oral and contingent agreements with small producers allows the exporter to bypass the risk of having to buy poor-quality cherries whilst also allowing them to abuse quality standards as a pretext to reduce cherry prices. The suppliers thus can never fully rely on verbally expressed terms to ensure their transaction against exporters’ opportunism. This is the kind of flexibility that exporters benefit from by offloading risk onto the producers.
The few cherry producers who were critical of the informality of the local market indicated discontent with the paternalist organization of the AKP in their province, particularly referring to how exporters with party affiliations consolidated monopoly power in the local cherry market. Some producers also linked the lack of solidarity among smallholders to party politics. The following words of a small producer present a rare but powerful critique of the socio-economic outcomes of a clientelist bourgeois state:
People who don’t care about agriculture or our region are making policy. This is an outcome of favoritism not professionalism, and it has direct implications for cherry producers like us because no one with power or status cares about us. Producers cannot come together to protect themselves from the buyers, either because they are polarized by party politics or because they fear challenging the dominant system. They want us to disappear (Small-Scale Producer 2021, personal communication).
According to this producer, smallholders would remain as “price-takers” if they did not start a cooperative who would bargain on behalf of its members (Small-Scale Producer 2021, personal communication). However, another small farmer, a retired chemical engineer aged over sixty years, was not too sanguine about the prospects of such a cooperative:
Back in 2008, we had low yields due to untimely rain. Even if we had low harvest quantities that year, buyers still offered us really low prices. The price I was offered was exactly the same price as the previous year’s when the cherry had been abundant. After some research, we learned that the exporters sign agreements with their international business partners around January. And if a natural disaster at the site of production resulted in low yields that season, then the exporter was given an extension to deliver the quantities it had agreed to. You see, in our case, the exporter abuses this extension and puts off buying for as long as it can, forcing the producers to accept lower prices as the clock starts ticking from the moment cherries are harvested. So, we got together as cherry producers and decided not to harvest the remaining cherries. Ziraat 0900 could wait for another two to three days on the branch, plus even if the exporters did not raise the price, people were fine with selling their cherries to the domestic market for cheaper. This was the one and only time that the producers came together, and we managed to double the price! It was a big win, but only momentary. The producers then went back to their selfishness, and became reluctant to attend regular meetings, take collective decisions and abide by them. … Another year or two [of low prices] and I think more than half the small-scale producers in Sancaklıbozköy will go out of business and have to sell their land to fruit companies (Small-Scale Producer 2021, personal communication).
Tracing the origin of my interlocutors’ mistrust in “people with power,” I found that the Şehzadeler CPU is only an organization on paper, with three non-elected members. All three members were village elites who owned 200–300 dönüms of cherry orchards in addition to other landed property and political links to the AKP. These three members got together for the first time to pay a courtesy visit to the then-newly elected provincial mayor together. The purpose of the visit was to lobby for government subsidies to construct a cherry marketplace. Although this project was delayed at the time due to lack of funding, the three medium-scale cherry producers collaborated on recruiting harvest workers. In a region with a shortage of farm labor, this collaboration to pool and share the temporary workers enabled the CPU members to be more competitive in the local market. The CPU had no intention to enhance small-scale producers’ position in the local cherry market.
As revealed by this example, smallholders are unwilling to participate in a collective such as producers’ unions or producer cooperatives in a context where village elites own much larger landholdings, connections, and powers. Allegiance to the AKP, that is also common among smallholders, comes with certain other responsibilities that overpower class interests or even the formation of a class consciousness. Thus, the ideological dominance established through the making of this frontier hinders the possibility of class politics by ensuring widespread allegiance to the party’s vision of neoliberal development with nationalistic and religious characteristics.
Why smallholders continue growing cherries: material and ideological underpinnings of a niche commodity frontier
An agricultural commodity frontier is a lively and relational zone of economic, ecological, and social change (Barney Reference Barney2009). Recognition of the relational character of a commodity frontier requires a keen focus on the interplay between endogenous and exogenous forces that shape and are shaped by the distinctly produced spaces and natures. In the case of the Şehzadeler frontier, the endogenous forces include (but are not limited to) the local social agents representing various strata of the state, producers of different sizes, exporter/producer companies, traders, workers, and labor contractors as well as the social and material meanings attributed to the crop itself. The exogenous dynamics, on the other hand, involve, inter alia, increasingly volatile and competitive global markets, transnational organizations, transnational grocery retailers, and unstable international currency conditions. However, endogenous and exogenous forces are interdependent.
The interplay between the endogenous and exogenous forces provokes the formation of new material realities and attendant subjectivities in the space of production. Such subjectivities are enmeshed with the current conjuncture, including not only economic rationales, but also the entire stock of cultural practices set in a political context. To ground these theoretical propositions spatially, and hence materially, below first I lay out the social agents and relations that have rendered Şehzadeler a cherry frontier. Then, I specifically demonstrate how smallholders’ continued adherence to the dominant nationalist ideology contributes to their willingness to participate in the making of the cherry frontier and ensure smallholder acquiescence in the overall contractual relation.
A unified prayer for capitalist “development”: state power catering to party politics
The Şehzadeler Municipality was founded in 2012 with the law that designated Manisa a metropolitan municipality,Footnote 7 and the 2014 municipal elections went in favor of the AKP in Şehzadeler. Upon coming to power, the municipal mayor published a thank you note on the municipal website wherein he promised the locals affordable housing by way of implementing mass housing projects and “converting the village into a satellite town” (Şehzadeler Municipality 2014). To achieve that, the mayor also announced that the municipality would collaborate with the Housing Development Agency (TOKI)Footnote 8 to make use of the areas where developers would not build residential units (Şehzadeler Municipality 2014). In 2016, the mayor announced that the ministerial cabinet approved the initiation of Şehzadeler’s urban renewal projects (Şehzadeler Municipality 2016b). By 2022, the municipality was announcing on its website that “prayers had risen from the urban renewal site” as the mayor visited the site and announced the parliament’s allocation of US$21 million for construction projects, including a public hospital, a mass housing project, local roads, and an industrial zone (Şehzadeler Belediyesi 2022), illustrating how the 2012 Metropolitan Law allowed the Municipality to re-zone agricultural land as residential and commercial spaces in an attempt to gain public support.
While residents’ satisfaction with housing development and other public services brought them closer to the AKP, the ruling party’s 2018 alliance with Turkey’s far-right nationalist party, the Nationalist Movement Party (MHP), allowed the AKP to ride the present nationalist waveFootnote 9 to power. The articulation of liberal Islam with the MHP’s nationalist ideologies normalized the incorporation of religious rhetoric and symbolism into Turkey’s existing fixation about national sovereignty and economic growth (Esen and Gumuscu Reference Esen and Gumuscu2019; Esen and Gümüşçü Reference Esen, Gümüşçü, Verney, Bosco and Aydın-Düzgit2020).
Another development project, enmeshed in the political atmosphere I pointed to above, was the construction of a “cherry marketplace”Footnote 10 in the village of Sancaklıbozköy. In 2016, the mayor announced the state treasury’s approval of the 138 dönüms of common pastureland to be handed over to the city of Şehzadeler for the construction of a marketplace where the producers bring their cherries for immediate sale after harvest. The mayor also lamented the “great pains that the cherry producers took to sell their cherries in the alleyways” prior to his party’s rule (Şehzadeler Municipality 2016a). With the newly built farm-to-market roads, cherry producers’ access to markets improved markedly.
This fusion of state, party, and religious authority was made visually explicit at the ceremony. As shown in Figure 2, the entire official delegation stood on the podium with their palms looking up – a collective gesture of prayer – to ask for God’s blessing on the commercial enterprise.
Ribbon-cutting ceremony of the cherry marketplace.
Resembling a colossal outdoor market, the cherry-buying center represents “the state-engineered rent-distribution process” among municipalities and private capital (Öniş Reference Öniş2019, 207). After all, mega infrastructure projects have long been the trump card for election campaigns led by the right-wing parties in Turkey. However, in this iteration of the articulation of religion with nationalism, these ceremonies increasingly turned into symbolic performances by invoking fantasies of reviving the Ottoman Empire and giving the Şehzadeler folk a sense of shared identity and purpose shaped by party affiliation.Footnote 11
As Esen and Gumuscu (Reference Esen and Gumuscu2016) note, the state and the party have been condensed into one authoritarian ruling body under the Sunni and Turkish ethnic nationalist ideology. This shift turned most state institutions into plain cogs in a self-serving authoritarian ideological apparatus. After being elected as the new president in 2014, Recep Tayyip Erdoğan refused to abide by his neutral status as the president and campaigned for the AKP across the country under the pretense of attending public openings, especially those of construction projects (Esen and Gumuscu Reference Esen and Gumuscu2016). Mega-construction projects, operationalized by many different actors beyond national borders, have been publicized with grand nationalistic and religious opening ceremonies. Although not a monumental project like “the largest airport in Europe” (i.e. İstanbul Airport), the opening ceremony of Şehzadeler’s cherry-buying center fits this pattern of using infrastructure to perform and enact political power. In turn, political party affiliation naturalizes other individual and collective identities, and here the actors tied to the cherry export frontier, thereby incorporating them into one coherent bloc. In addition to the ideological alignment, infrastructure projects also enabled mass employment and mass housing (Tuğal Reference Tuğal2022) through the state-led commodification of land, but without causing “large-scale dispossession and displacement, and with strong anchorage in low-income urban and rural groups” (Atasoy Reference Atasoy2017, 660).
Lastly, alongside construction-led development, visions of market expansion for Turkish cherries have served as both a powerful discursive tool and a material objective for rendering a unified bloc in favor of export-oriented cherry production. Traditionally, Russia and Europe have been the primary destinations for Turkish cherries. However, a strategic shift towards the burgeoning Asian-Pacific markets has emerged in recent years. This shift can be attributed to persistent efforts by the Turkish Ministry of Agriculture, the Ministry of Trade, and regional exporters’ associations. Over the past few years, these key actors have implemented a multi-layered approach to solidify Turkey’s position within the global cherry market. For example, persistent diplomatic visits to China culminated in a breakthrough in 2015. China agreed to lift the requirement that Turkish cherries undergo sixteen days of cold storage at 1°C prior to export, thereby opening the Chinese market to Turkish exporters.
This development was met with widespread celebration by fresh fruit exporters and relevant government agencies, fostering a narrative of a national “success story,” although the path to market access have since proven to be complex.Footnote 12
Cherries as a national asset
Despite the challenges of contractual production, smallholders at the cherry frontier have embraced the new agricultural regime of export-oriented cherry production. They have actively participated in not just cherry production, but also in the process of rendering the cherry a national asset that deserved celebration.
This process is situated within a broader promotional “ecosystem” driven by key industry and state actors. The economic success of the cherry – often highlighted in the media, with Turkey celebrated as a global leader in production and exports – provides the backdrop for these efforts (Ceylan Reference Ceylan2019; Çalkaya Reference Çalkaya2021; Güngör Reference Güngör2023; Şan Reference Şan2020; Sezgin Reference Sezgin2017). On their websites and social media accounts, powerful groups like the Aegean Exporters’ Association (Ege İhracatçı Birlikleri) actively construct a narrative of national grandeur, celebrating record-breaking export figures (Hürriyet 2019; egeihracatci 2021, 2023, 2024). Official institutions further amplify this message: the Manisa Provincial Authority and the Şehzadeler Municipality ritualize the agricultural calendar by formally heralding the first harvest and announcing the winners of “best cherry” competitions. In doing so, they establish a potent narrative of the cherry’s importance long before the festival begins.
Against this backdrop of continuous promotion, the annual festival itself functions as the crucial site where this narrative is performed locally, linking it directly to politics and community-building. It is highly popular among locals, not merely as a celebration of their primary agricultural product, but as a key social event that reinforces the relationship between the community and the municipal government. This connection is made explicit during the festivities. For instance, the opening speech of the festival in 2022 was delivered by the muhtar (village head) of Sancaklıbozköy, who began by thanking the municipal mayor for his services, such as building a multi-purpose hall, i.e. “the largest wedding hall in the area,” and a new recreational park. The festival is thus also a significant political event, attended by a roster of high-ranking executives, including the provincial mayor of Manisa, the municipal mayor of Şehzadeler, the district governor, district chairmen of the MHP and AKP, alongside the provincial director of agriculture, district gendarmerie commander, the president of the chamber of agriculture, and representatives of political parties. Then he continued with the following:
Our dear Mayor has shown us once again how much he loves us. … No matter how much I thank our mayor on behalf of myself and my people, it would be insufficient. He built us a cherry market that is unique in Turkey. As if that were not enough, he asphalted approximately 17 km of country road last year so that the first cherries of the Northern hemisphere would not get covered in dust. We have endless love and respect for the man who serves his people and his nation.
Following the muhtar, the municipal and provincial mayors and the governor went up to the stage. They took turns to pray to God to help them in their service to the local community. The governor went on to say that farming was one of the most “sacred” professions and he added how he was proud of the local cherry producers for the Turkish cherry’s success in global markets. As clapping drowned out the rest of his sentence, he gestured cherry producers to go on to the dance floor for “well-deserved fun.”
As the scene I describe above illustrates, spaces and performances of spectacle play a key role in rendering the cherry a national asset worthy of celebration. Further, the role of current state ideology and practices in shaping a nationalist–religious narrative around a lucrative global commodity like the cherry is undeniable. I follow Cihan Tuğal (Reference Tuğal2023) in defining Turkey’s current regime as “neoliberal statism.” According to Tuğal (Reference Tuğal2023), neoliberal statism is a hybrid ideological and political–economic model that combines elements of both neoliberalism and state capitalism. It involves significant state intervention in the economy, particularly through public–private partnerships and investment in specific sectors. While sharing neoliberal characteristics such as commodification of nature and urban landscapes, and a heavy reliance on global finance, neoliberal statism deviates from classic neoliberalism by prioritizing state-led economic development and social engineering. It differs from traditional state capitalism in its reliance on market mechanisms and its focus on national dominance rather than on extending national influence on a global scale. Politicization of megaprojects and their instrumentalization to generate popular consent for the economic growth strategies of the current religious–nationalist regime becomes definitive in how development is viewed (urban, construction-based, and patriotic) and supported by the populace with feelings of national pride.
The nationalist–religious ideology that I describe above crucially underpins the current production regime at the cherry frontier. Creating the illusion that small cherry producers are part of something grandiose is key to generating tacit consent despite the injustices they face due to the contract production regime. To be sure, the smallholders do acknowledge that large national and international export companies dominate the local cherry market, and they admit to having poor bargaining power over the price they receive for their cherries. Yet, at the same time, they take pride in taking part in the making of Şehzadeler a “cherry town,” which not only includes perceived accomplishments such as making a name in the global market, but also infrastructural developments that rendered the frontier more connected to the urban centers around it.
This pride, a blend of economic satisfaction and national sentiment, is clearly articulated by Sebahattin. While technically a small-scale cherry grower, his diversified income streams include a jewelry shop in downtown Manisa and a large almond orchard in İzmir. For him, the cherry harvest is more than just a source of income; it is an affirmation of national success and a reason to be grateful for state and municipal support. He explains:
We produce the best cherries in Turkey. Even Queen Elizabeth preferred Turkish cherries. Since we harvest early, demand is always high. This year, I sold my cherries to traders at good prices, and I sell over two tons of cherries a season. We get to sell all we produce. That’s a good deal, one should be thankful. Thanks to Allah, our municipality and our state, I can experience the pride of selling my cherries to markets in European Union countries, Russia, and the Far East (Small-Scale Producer 2024, personal communication).
Given the place of cherry production in the diversified livelihoods of smallholders, “additional cash income” that it provides is viewed as a welcome benefit.
Conclusion
This article set out to understand how a united cherry frontier of sweet cherries brought together large farmers with smallholders in western Turkey, even though smallholders have become marginalized in the post-ARIP period. More broadly, the article also showed how the “win–win” ethos of large-scale export agriculture in “developing” economies is maintained by invoking national duty and patriotism through political party affiliations even amongst smallholders that are threatened by the very export regime.
To be sure, smallholders’ material gains play an important role in maintaining contractual production at the cherry frontier. Further, their acquiescence does not necessarily indicate genuine consent or satisfaction with these gains. However, their continued involvement in contractual cherry production cannot be understood as merely a function of their economic benefits, especially given their position as price-takers. Rather, this involvement has both material and affective dimensions, including the ability to generate cash income early in the harvest season and the flexibility of having multiple income streams as well as subscription to the ideology and performances of equating international economic success of Turkish cherry exports with service to the nation.
Findings of this research reinforce Neil Smith’s (Reference Smith1984) argument that spaces and natures are produced in distinct ways under capitalism. Class difference articulates with ideological components and sweet cherry’s materiality to create a complex and contradictory set of social relations that are inherently and highly uneven. To explain this complexity, my analysis has placed non-agrarian components of rural space-making on equal footing with agricultural activities in the Şehzadeler cherry frontier. This orientation allowed for integrating relevant non-agricultural aspects, including the construction boom in peri-urban spaces, consolidation of power through municipal authority and local party politics, and representations of space to serve ideological purposes. Paying sufficient attention to the role of contingent geohistorical circumstances allowed for a more complete analysis of how various actors with diverging interests and tensions produce a commodity frontier.
My findings indicate that party politics and ideology were fundamental in smoothing over differences of interest among various actors, thus provisionally and temporarily resolving the contradictions of this frontier. The grandiose imaginary of a nation with a “glorious past” and a “new” nation “developing,” and one capable of spectacular infrastructure projects, has serious impact on a tightly shared peri-urban space between high-value export agriculture and industry. Discursive strategies of the state–capital alliance that mobilized nation-scale pride is intended to establish direct control over the organization of society and space. This is evident in the demand for unquestioned allegiance of smallholders and larger farmers alike to this political project. The unquestioned nature of this allegiance is best demonstrated by smallholders’ acceptance of their role as “price-takers” from large exporters, as well as the functioning of the CPU as a puppet organization to political power that has failed to advocate for producers’ interests – reflecting the role expected of civil society in the AKP’s vision for the country.
My empirical analysis above also showed how “representations of space” and “spaces of representation” are utilized in building a new socio-spatial reality from the ground up (Mitchell Reference Mitchell2021, 145). This is best exemplified by the opening ceremony of the colossal cherry marketplace in Şehzadeler, which serves towards the use of infrastructure as a political instrument in generating consent and ensuring ideological commitment to neoliberal statism (see Tuğal Reference Tuğal2022).
At the most general level, the findings of this article highlight the need to spatialize theories of agrarian change and the politics of multi-scalar agri-food activities therein. Spatializing theories of agricultural production via political context and ethnographic accounts like the one presented here allows for locating space and society as co-constitutive elements such that any attempt to consider one without the other would remain significantly incomplete.
Acknowledgments
I would like to thank Sarah Wakefield, Mike Ekers, and Baran Karsak for their comments on early drafts of this work. I would also like to thank the editors and anonymous referees of the New Perspectives on Turkey for their helpful and constructive feedback.
Competing interests
The author declares that they have no known competing financial interests or personal relationships that could have appeared to influence the work reported in this paper.
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