Introduction
In the twenty-first century, several high-value food commodities became categorized as “superfoods.”Footnote 1 The global demand for these products increased sharply with repercussions for agricultural production and trade. Existing accounts often locate the origins of superfoods in the shifting consumer interest towards niche products, while framing production geographies as passive spaces catering to changing global demand regimes. Such prioritization of consumption cultures comes at the expense of agricultural producers, obscuring not only the historical context of farming communities but also the historical and novel forces driving production and shaping high-value crop/fruit markets in today’s countryside. To adequately address these underlying processes, it is imperative to question how and why certain high-value crops, such as “superfoods,” create new production and/or export geographies.
One key aspect often overlooked in the literature on superfood export geographies is the role of agricultural research, development, and education (i.e. extension) activities in contributing to or making possible these high-value-commodity export geographies. This article highlights this connection by tracing the history of avocado production in southern Turkey with a focus on the role of public agricultural extension. It argues that publicly funded research and extension activities were not only essential for making avocado cultivation possible in the first place, but they continue to influence the ways in which production is carried out today. The analysis reveals that a series of conflicts between Ministry of Agriculture actors and agricultural producers in Turkey’s Mediterranean shoreline resulted in a large avocado production geography in southern Turkey which did not turn into a mainly export-oriented endeavor as often seen in the global markets of high-value, niche commodities such as superfoods.
Specifically, this study asks two interrelated questions: what was the role (if any) of public agricultural research and extension in making avocado cultivation possible in southern Turkey? And, if agricultural production geographies are passive spaces responding only to global consumption trends (as implicitly assumed in many studies on superfoods), then why has Turkey’s rising avocado production not been matched by a similar rise in its avocado exports?
To answer these questions, I draw primarily upon data collected through ethnographic fieldwork conducted along the southern Mediterranean coast of Turkey, from November 2019 to April 2020. In addition to informal conversations with locals, I conducted thirty-nine formal interviews with key informants, including local peasants and farmers,Footnote 2 traders, and bureaucrats. I also conducted participant-observation in a number of different contexts: numerous orchard tours by local avocado growers; the wholesale fruit and vegetable market in Alanya; two seminars held for local avocado producers by various branches of the Ministry of Agriculture; multiple online seminars and workshops held by various branches of the Ministry; the annual general assembly of the Alanya Avocado Growers’ Association; offices of avocado traders; and Ministry of Agriculture offices including local directorates of agriculture as well as the Ministry’s regional agricultural research center. I base the historical analysis on oral-historical accounts of locals and Ministry of Agriculture actors, complemented by documentary evidence, where available.
Superfoods as “high-value foods,” “miracle crops,” and commodities in global circulation
The current shift in southern Turkey’s agricultural production base from citrus fruits and bananas to mainly avocados (among a few other tropical fruits) exemplifies a global trend whereby “classical export commodities (coffee, tea, sugar, tobacco, cocoa and so on) have been increasingly displaced by so-called ‘high value foods’ (HVF)” (Watts and Goodman Reference Watts, Goodman, Goodman and Watts2005, 8). As such, this case study reflects a broader trend whereby farmers in the global South strategically pivot towards high-value crops catered to niche export markets as a means of survival within neoliberalized agricultural regimes.
Indeed, the surge in avocado production along Turkey’s Mediterranean coast occurred during a period of heightened commodification within Turkish agriculture when the dismantling of support programs had exposed farmers to the risks of international markets (Keyder and Yenal Reference Keyder and Yenal2011). Faced with dwindling state support and the lack of protectionist policies (Aydın Reference Aydın2010), many smallholders in this region were forced to sell their landholdings and began depending on agricultural employment (wage labor) and/or non-agricultural sources of income (primarily in tourism and construction sectors). Meanwhile, those remaining on land sought more lucrative alternatives to traditional commodities. In this context, the rising popularity of avocado as a high-value “superfood” (McDonell and Wilk Reference McDonell and Wilk2020a; Miller Reference Miller2020) made it an attractive choice for farmers in southern Turkey.
As shown in Figure 1, this trend is reflected in the drastic increase of area harvested for avocados in Turkey, rising from 183 ha in 2012 to 4,721 ha in 2023. Mirroring the increase in area harvested, the annual avocado production has climbed from 1,463 tonnes in 2012 to a record of 40,181 tonnes in 2022. However, it is also important to note that exports have not caught up with production, accounting for an average of roughly 12 percent of total production over the five-year period between 2019 and 2023 (Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations n.d.).
Turkey’s avocado production and exports.
Source: Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations (n.d.)
This is partly explained by the higher prices traders can receive on the domestic market compared to the global market. Indeed, avocado producers in southern Turkey continue to enjoy a high profit margin by selling mainly to the domestic market. For example, in 2023 the Turkish avocado market had annual average producer prices as high as US$1,909/tonne, while producers in Mexico – by far the largest avocado producer and exporter country – received US$1,138/tonne in the same year (Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations n.d.). Still, a fast-growing domestic market coupled with stagnating exports constitutes an interesting puzzle against some of the main assumptions found in the academic literature on global production and trade in superfoods, and guides one of the research questions of this study.
Discursively categorized as a superfood, avocado is a special high-value food. As such, avocado production can be meaningfully addressed within the emerging body of literature on global production and trade in superfoods. Within superfoods literature, a relatively large number of studies focus on shifting consumer cultures towards health-conscious individualism (Erler et al. Reference Erler, Keck and Dittrich2022; Franco Lucas et al. Reference Franco Lucas, Costa and Brunner2021, Reference Franco Lucas, Götze, Vieira Costa and Brunner2023; Hassoun et al. Reference Hassoun, Harastani, Jagtap, Trollman, Garcia-Garcia, Awad, Zannou, Galanakis, Goksen, Nayik, Riaz and Maqsood2024; Sikka Reference Sikka2019, Reference Sikka2023) and marketing efforts that specifically target such consumer cultures (Curll et al. Reference Curll, Parker, MacGregor and Petersen2016; Gandhi et al. Reference Gandhi, Meyer, Bogdanski and Walasek2023; Guthman Reference Guthman, McDonell and Wilk2020; Loyer Reference Loyer2017; Loyer and Knight Reference Loyer and Knight2018; MacGregor et al. Reference MacGregor, Petersen and Parker2021; Parker et al. Reference Parker, Johnson and Curll2019; Reisman Reference Reisman2020; Spackman Reference Spackman, McDonell and Wilk2020; Weitkamp and Eidsvaag Reference Weitkamp and Eidsvaag2014) to explain the making of superfood markets globally.
In existing accounts on rural development, superfoods are occasionally presented as “miracle crops” positioned as solutions for complex global challenges including hunger, food insecurity, malnutrition, poverty, economic inequality, and climate change. Such uncritical development narratives often overlook the inherently political dimensions of these issues. Yet, scholars deftly point out the contradictions therein. For example, McDonell (Reference McDonell2015, Reference McDonell, McDonell and Wilk2020) and Li (Reference Li2023) critically study discourses adopted by international development community on quinoa as a “miracle crop” to solve many large-scale and mutually exclusive global issues, while Bétrisey and Boisvert (Reference Bétrisey, Boisvert, McDonell and Wilk2020) demonstrate this through the case of amaranth in Mexico, and Brondizio (Reference Brondizio, McDonell and Wilk2020) using the case of açai in Brazil.
Another set of literature emphasizes the economic, environmental, and sociocultural consequences of an increasing demand for and international trade in superfoods on producer communities in the global South. Areas of focus include inequalities explored through value-chain analyses, consequences of new agricultural export commodity zones on rural livelihoods (both economically and nutritionally), and environmental injustices like global virtual water trade from water-poor regions to water-rich regions via global trade in agricultural commodities (Alandia et al. Reference Alandia, Rodriguez, Jacobsen, Bazile and Condori2020; Avitabile Reference Avitabile2015; Caro et al. Reference Caro, Alessandrini, Sporchia and Borghesi2021; Magrach and Sanz Reference Magrach and Sanz2020; Ofstehage Reference Ofstehage2011, Reference Ofstehage2012; Turner Reference Turner2019).
Fewer studies draw a more complex picture by zooming in on the historical, contextual factors within production geographies. For example, McDonell (Reference McDonell2019) offers a nuanced perspective on the transition of quinoa from “Indian food” to “superfood” in Peru, showing that “contingency matters” (Tsing Reference Tsing2005), and “‘markets’ and ‘places’ are not separate as is often assumed” (McDonell Reference McDonell2019, 67).
The incorporation of tropical fruit producers into global markets has historically necessitated the standardization of produce, which is known to have significant impacts on producers, and particularly on smallholders (Daviron Reference Daviron2002). More recent research has demonstrated the influence of state policy and other contextual factors on how booms in high-value agricultural commodities impact small farmers. For instance, Hall (Reference Hall2011) contends that while much of the existing scholarship on high-value crop booms focuses on external factors, the power dynamics affecting smallholders during these periods also stem from political decisions in producer countries. Building on this perspective, Cramb et al. (Reference Cramb, Manivong, Newby, Sothorn and Sibat2017) demonstrate that even though high-value crop booms often exacerbate existing inequalities among farmers, whether these booms prove devastating for smallholders is also contingent upon contextual factors, such as pre-existing levels of socio-economic disparity within farming communities, the vulnerability of poorer households, and the presence of mechanisms for land dispossession favoring external investors. Serrano and Brooks (Reference Serrano and Brooks2019) studied the avocado market in Santander, Colombia, showing how government policies that prioritize large-scale investors for export-driven production – requiring standardized product characteristics – lead to the exclusion of small-scale farmers from both global and national markets. Exclusion of landless peasants from the new avocado market has been shown to create increasingly tense social relations in southern Turkey’s farming communities, as well (Karsak Reference Karsak2024a). Together these works underscore the significance of national-level policy, political decisions, and other social, historical and economic factors at the local level in determining how high-value commodity booms impact agricultural producers, especially smallholders.
Overall, most cultural studies on superfoods tend to focus on explaining the rising consumer interest in this new category of foods, while others explain the same phenomenon from the side of marketing. Fewer studies take a macro-level, political-economy approach to highlight some of the many contradictions found in the idea of rural development via high-value-crop or superfood farming. Considerations on environmental, economic, and sociocultural consequences of superfood production and trade guide a different set of studies, where increasing consumer demand for superfood products is either explicitly or implicitly portrayed as a cause for concern for production geographies. Yet, fewer studies locate superfoods as high-value crops in the broader political, historical, and cultural context of producer countries to draw a more complete picture.
Against this background and focusing on a single commodity to clearly map out contextual factors, this article foregrounds the history of the Turkish state’s involvement in agricultural production through publicly funded research and extension activities. By so doing, it highlights key institutional processes that effectively allowed for the making of a superfood (avocado) production geography in southern Turkey, as well as continuing extension efforts for export-oriented standardization.
In the following section, I outline some of the key characteristics of public agricultural extension in Turkey, before describing two distinct phases of active engagement by Turkey’s Ministry of Agriculture in research and extension efforts as it relates to avocado production. During the first phase (1930s–1980s), avocado-related efforts served the state’s goal of rural development, reflecting a developmentalist logic that sought to support the rural population through crop diversification. The second phase (2010s–present) marks a hands-off approach to agricultural extension, that aims to achieve product type and quality standardization for export, with dwindling support for small producers and incentives that favor large-scale investors in agriculture.
I argue that both phases of state involvement demonstrate a high degree of disconnect between advocated production models and farmers’ realities. Nonetheless, by importing and developing commercial avocado varieties in publicly funded nurseries, the first phase of state involvement made commercial avocado cultivars available to farmers, and thus allowed for southern Turkey’s farmers to take advantage of a rising consumer interest in avocados that started much later, in the 2010s. The second phase, on the other hand, is currently placing farmers under ever-increasing pressure to adopt high-risk production practices with an aim to standardize product type and quality for international markets.
Background: agricultural research and extension in Turkey
Globally, public agricultural extension services traditionally operated on a top-down model, disseminating knowledge, information, and technology from experts to farmers with the primary goal of boosting agricultural production. This approach remained dominant until the late twentieth century, when the global shift towards neoliberal agricultural policies led to the gradual dismantling of this centralized system. Subsequently, there was a move towards privatized and more decentralized extension approaches. By the 1980s, growing calls for decentralization highlighted the importance of non-governmental actors (civil society and the private sector) in fostering more horizontal and participatory extension methods. Later policy shifts in the global North aimed to address local needs more directly through farmer participation in the extension process which was also an effort to circumvent the perceived bureaucratic inefficiencies of traditional public extension services (Feder et al. Reference Feder, Willett and Zijp1999; Kidd et al. Reference Kidd, Lamers, Ficarelli and Hoffmann2000; Rivera Reference Rivera1996).
In Turkey, agricultural research and extension have remained as predominantly state-run systems – taking place through collaboration between the Ministry of Agriculture and universities – characterized by a strictly hierarchical structure, persistent communication challenges, a limited role played by private firms, and relatively slow integration of more recent, participatory approaches (Ozcatalbas et al. Reference Ozcatalbas, Brumfield and Ozkan2004). Research and extension services led by the Ministry of Agriculture have played a key role in nation-building efforts of the early twentieth century. However, the overall system has been criticized for fragmentation of research institutions and a lack of effective communication among them, which impedes effective production and sharing of information (Ozcatalbas et al. Reference Ozcatalbas, Brumfield and Ozkan2004). More importantly, for the most part, extension agents have been unable to connect with peasants and farmers, maintaining an attitude of superiority and often pointing to “traditionalism, low education levels and insufficient information” among the peasantry for explaining lower-than-expected adoption rates of new practices (Boyacı and Yıldız Reference Boyacı and Yıldız2016, 153). This echoes a global trend whereby farmer hesitancy gets framed as “irrational.” As Cook et al. (Reference Cook, Satizábal and Curnow2021) identify, this perspective stems from a tendency to “render technical” (Li Reference Li and Mosse2011), that is, to reduce complex issues to simple problems solvable by experts while ignoring the social, cultural, and economic factors that shape farmers’ decision-making.
Turkey’s extension service operates through a top-down structure extending from the Ministry of Agriculture to its eighty-one provincial directorates down to county and village levels. The system currently in place was heavily influenced by the World Bank-recommended Training and Visit (T&V) approach, implemented nationwide beginning in 1984 as part of the Agricultural Extension and Applied Research Project (AEARP). This model aimed to create a more disciplined system of farmer engagement and strengthen the weak link between research, extension, and farmers on the ground. However, the T&V system is fundamentally a top-down approach for information dissemination. In practice, the connection between research and farmers in the extension process remained a significant problem in Turkey, as in most other jurisdictions (Ozcatalbas et al. Reference Ozcatalbas, Brumfield and Ozkan2004).
Extension activities in Turkey have traditionally focused on increasing production and yield through conventional farming practices, and these services have been directed primarily toward medium- and large-scale commercial farms, with less focus on the country’s vast number of small farms and peasant producers (Boyacı and Yıldız Reference Boyacı and Yıldız2016). Further, Boyacı and Yıldız (Reference Boyacı and Yıldız2016, 156) found that extension agents face numerous challenges, including “low salaries, mismatching of authority and responsibility, issues related to personnel affairs, and lack of regular in-service training.”
The adoption of new information and communication technologies like the internet and mobile devices in public extension remains limited. Traditional face-to-face methods, such as farm visits and farmer meetings, remain the most commonly used communication channels. Furthermore, farmer participation in defining problems and developing solutions is not a priority, reflecting the system’s top-down nature (Boyacı and Yıldız Reference Boyacı and Yıldız2016).
A more recent case study of public extension programs in Turkey’s Hatay province further substantiates these systemic critiques, providing localized evidence of the national-level challenges (Demirtaş and Kaya Reference Demirtaş and Kaya2018). The study confirms that Turkish extension is primarily a state-run affair based on a “technological transfer” model, historically rooted in the top-down T&V approach (Demirtaş and Kaya Reference Demirtaş and Kaya2018; Ozcatalbas et al. Reference Ozcatalbas, Brumfield and Ozkan2004). Authors also found that the technical support needed by the country’s numerous small-scale farms is “often disregarded” (Demirtaş and Kaya Reference Demirtaş and Kaya2018, 204), confirming the biases inherent in current extension practices toward larger commercial operations as identified by Boyacı and Yıldız (Reference Boyacı and Yıldız2016). The one-way, top-down transfer approach is reflected in the methods used in Hatay, which rely heavily on farmer meetings and printed circulars, while contemporary communication technologies like the internet and cell phones are “insufficiently used” (Demirtaş and Kaya Reference Demirtaş and Kaya2018). This mirrors the national-level data showing that digital devices are generally underutilized in farmer training (Boyacı and Yıldız Reference Boyacı and Yıldız2016).
With a primary focus on the needs of larger, commercial farms at the expense of the country’s multitude of small farms (Boyacı and Yıldız Reference Boyacı and Yıldız2016), the Turkish system of extension largely ignores locally specific contexts, risk perceptions, and economic constraints in which small farmers operate. For example, when small-scale farmers exhibit low adoption rates for new technologies, the failure is frequently attributed by extension agents to the farmers’ “traditionalism” or lack of education, rather than to the potential inappropriateness of the technology itself or the socio-economic constraints they face (Boyacı and Yıldız Reference Boyacı and Yıldız2016). Focusing on agricultural research and extension in the avocado context, findings of this research (presented below) confirm that interventions by the Ministry of Agriculture, both historically and currently, demonstrate a significant disconnect between production advice and the social and economic contexts in which the majority of southern Turkey’s farmers and peasants carry out agricultural production.
Two phases of state involvement in avocado production in Turkey
The Turkish state’s engagement with avocado production has evolved significantly over the past century, shifting from its early focus on rural development to a contemporary push for export-oriented standardization. While the state’s overarching goals in agriculture have changed, the analysis below demonstrates a key continuity, that is, a persistent, top-down approach and a disconnect between its agricultural vision and on-the-ground realities of farmers. This foundational divide, between the Ministry actors’ vision and farmers’ contexts, concerns and priorities, forms the central thread across my accounts of both historical periods. In the remainder of this article, I first show how early state interventions, despite their initial failures, laid the groundwork for the current avocado boom in southern Turkey. I then demonstrate how contemporary extension efforts, which pressure farmers to adopt high-risk practices for international markets, are actively navigated and resisted, ultimately shaping the crop’s trajectory toward the domestic market.
Phase 1: research and extension for rural economic development and food self-sufficiency, 1930s–1980s
From the early years of the Turkish Republic, building a national agricultural base meant that essential items for the population’s diet had to be produced domestically, in a self-sufficient manner. Creativity was initially fueled by the requirement of providing people with essential needs, and later with an aim to lead rural economic development.
Tea and sugar beets, for example, were successfully naturalized products that began to be produced and processed in mass quantities in factories under state monopoly in the early national developmentalist era (see Alexander Reference Alexander2002; Hann Reference Hann1990). One important dietary component which Turkey did not produce at the time was citrus fruit (e.g. lemons, oranges). Citrus products were supplied from the Syria–Palestine–Lebanon region before World War I, yet could no longer be adequately sourced from these regions in the early Republican era. To adapt these plants to Turkey’s climate, in 1934 in Antalya, a state institute named Sıcak İklim Nebatları İstasyonu (Station for Warm Climate Plants) was established. Its name was changed to Antalya Narenciye İstasyonu (Antalya Citrus Station) in 1936, and following other minor changes, finally to BATEM (Western Mediterranean Agricultural Research Institute Directorate – hereinafter referred to as “BATEM”) in 2004. The institute which remains today as BATEM under the Ministry of Agriculture has historically worked in adapting a variety of fruits and crops to the climate of southern Turkey, and was responsible for a first attempt in the 1930s, and later a 1968 agreement with the United Nations (UN) Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO) to introduce a number of commercial avocado cultivars into Turkey.
The earliest record of avocado trees in Turkey is found in a 1967 entry in the California Avocado Society Yearbook by Henri Chapot, a UN FAO horticulturalist. There, Chapot provided a photograph of an avocado tree in the garden of the Citrus Research Institute of Antalya which he wrote was introduced from California in early 1930s. Chapot wrote the following in this 1967 entry:
The first avocado seeds were introduced about 35 years ago, mainly at the Adana Agriculture School. Soon after, grafted trees were imported from California and planted at the Antalya Citrus Institute. They were mainly of Duke variety. Subsequently some trees were frozen in 1942 and are represented now only by sprouts of the rootstock. From these trees, seeds were collected and planted in various locations, such as the Iskenderun Citrus Experiment Station, the Alanya State Nursery and the Antalya Citrus Institute itself (Chapot Reference Chapot1967, 93).
… To sum up, we can say that Turkey offers important potentialities for growing avocado trees. From a practical point of view no major problem could arise from the climate, the soil, nor the irrigation water. The main difficulty lies in the lack of propagating material, mainly mother-trees of commercial varieties. It is expected that the UNDP/SF/FAO [United Nations Development Programme/Special Fund/Food and Agriculture Organization] Project will bring a solution to it within the next three years (Chapot Reference Chapot1967, 95).
As noted by Chapot (Reference Chapot1967), in 1968, the Ministry of Agriculture of the Republic initiated the second effort to develop commercial avocado varieties for southern Turkey’s growing conditions. As I confirmed during a visit to BATEM, beginning in 1968, the Ministry had arranged the import of four commercial varieties (Zutano, Bacon, Fuerte, and Hass), through the UN FAO. These varieties were chosen as they could withstand brief periods of frost and snow that occasionally occur in the southernmost shoreline of the country. The aim of this 1968 partnership with the UN FAO was to introduce potentially lucrative crops to the countryside for rural development (personal communication, March 2020).
Imported varieties were planted in state-owned nurseries of BATEM. By 1980, these state nurseries had got successful results with commercial varieties, and at that time they began distributing grafted saplings to a select group of farmers that they called “preeminent farmers”Footnote 3 of the region. “It is in the institutional culture of the Ministry,” I was told by a Ministry bureaucrat during an interview, “to distribute seeds or grafted saplings of new crops or fruits to preeminent farmers, in order to convince other local peasants and farmers into considering producing these as well.” Preeminent farmers, from the Ministry’s perspective, are relatively wealthy farmers who are well known and reputable in their villages and who traditionally act as opinion leaders. The idea was that if those leading farmers in each town were convinced to plant commercial avocado orchards, then this intervention would be successful, because peasants of the region would follow the lead of preeminent farmers.
However, these early attempts revealed a lack of understanding of farmers’ interests. The Ministry’s attempts to actively distribute grafted avocado saplings to preeminent farmers of the region during the 1970s and the 1980s were not sufficient to convince these farmers to give avocados a chance. As both agriculturalists who had worked as lead researchers of avocados at BATEM confirmed during interviews, farmers were not easily persuaded to grow avocados for commercial purposes in those decades. This was due mainly to risk perceptions of farmers at the time, hesitating to invest in a relatively unknown fruit with no domestic market.
This resistance was best exemplified in my interview with a local of the area who took care of the family orchard of one of the “preeminent farmers” of Oba neighborhood of Alanya as a sharecropper. He explained that at the time (the early 1980s) the family was close friends with the district director of agriculture (at the local branch of the Ministry) there. The district director of agriculture, he suggested, had insisted that they plant some of the grafted avocado saplings being provided from the nurseries of BATEM. He explained that in order to please his friend, the family patriarch unenthusiastically took the avocado saplings from the director. “But,” he laughed, “he [the family patriarch] planted those avocado trees in the worst parts of the orchard – those areas in his citrus orchard with the least favorable soil, sun, wind conditions!” Although this farmer at the time was not willing to replace orange trees with avocado trees whose fruits were little known and had no market value in the country, those few saplings (despite being planted in the least favorable parts of the orchard) had grown to be productive trees. Today, this orchard still remains a primarily citrus orchard with a few avocado trees in between: trees once unwillingly planted for the sake of an acquaintance at the Ministry branch. The reluctant planting of avocado saplings, or planting of those avocado saplings in those parts of his orchard least favorable for citrus trees, serves to demonstrate the resistance that preeminent farmers showed to the imposition by the Ministry.Footnote 4
Nonetheless, when avocados later gained global popularity and significant market value as a superfood, the concerted efforts of this initial phase had made commercial avocado cultivars already available to farmers in southern Turkey. It was thanks to availability of grafted commercial avocado cultivars in BATEM nurseries that when avocado fruit became a high-value commodity (both globally and domestically) in the late 2000s, local farmers had the option to plant commercial avocado orchards along southern Turkey’s fertile Mediterranean shoreline. In material terms, without the 1968 UN Development Programme/FAO partnership with the Ministry of Agriculture to introduce and adapt commercial varieties of avocados into the country, these commercial varieties would not have been accessible to farmers in southern Turkey.
In the following section, I turn to examining the role of contemporary agricultural extension efforts on shaping avocado production today, with a specific focus on emerging tensions between farmers and Ministry actors regarding production methods.
Phase 2: public agricultural extension for high-risk, export-oriented production
Conflicting views between preeminent farmers and the Ministry officials on whether or not to produce avocados for commercial purposes (in the first phase) have more recently translated into a series of tensions between Ministry officials and local farmers about how to produce avocados (in the second phase). The now strong demand for avocados in the domestic market, coupled with potential to export, make avocados a very attractive choice for southern Turkey’s farmers today. Therefore, producers do not need any additional incentive to decide on producing avocados for commercial purposes, but this time (1) the variety of avocados to be produced, (2) its intended market (domestic versus export), and (3) its production methods emerge as contested grounds between extensionists’ visions and farmers’ realities.
Before describing specifics, it is important to note that the conflicting views between extensionists (Ministry actors) and local farmers are largely explained by the mismatch between the actual land tenure patterns (dominated by peasant and small-farmer production on merely few-acre plots) and the ideal imagined by the Ministry actors (large-scale, entrepreneurial investors on large plots of land). Indeed, there is a new trend of outside investors (non-locals, and typically non-farmers) acquiring large lots of land (100+ dönüm) to start avocado farming. These investors, who are still few in numbers, often follow the guidelines advocated by extensionists, which comes easy for them given their size of operations and financial power, as I explain below.
Extensionists openly admit their preference for larger actors consolidating farmland which is currently highly scattered in land tenure. In one of my interviews, an official at a local Ministry of Agriculture branch told me that investors “from places like Adana”Footnote 5 who are “educated and have business experience in industry” are ideal contacts that they pursue to convince into avocado farming. “Those looking to add agriculture to the range of commercial activities as a safety net” make the best farmers in their view. They explained that when an industrialist from Adana establishes a 5,000-dönüm orchard, they will have the means to support the education of their children, who often “receive graduate degrees overseas” and later “return home to take over the family business.” They argued that this is the only way for “kurumsallaşma” – corporate-like professionalization in business operations and brand development – in Turkish agriculture. To contrast this vision with the majority of current avocado producers in southern Turkey, they added:
Being a farmer [çiftçi] as opposed to a peasant [köylü] means that you know what you are doing, work diligently to enlarge your operations, invest in proper technology and infrastructure. The peasants here just do not have this worldview, this capacity, or the education needed. Their kids will likely become cooks’ helpers at hotels, instead of getting that business education.
Against the backdrop of this fundamental contradiction between the elitist vision for the “ideal farmer” imagined by Ministry officials and peasants or small-scale farmers on the ground, I now turn to specific and interrelated points of conflict currently dominating the agricultural extension process in southern Turkey as it relates to avocado farming.
Over the last decade, extension services for southern Turkey’s avocado producers have been provided in the form of a series of seminars open to the public, held at regular intervals at each major town center along the shoreline from Alanya, Antalya to Samandağ, Hatay. In addition to these regular, in-person events, a series of online-synchronous seminars was given during the COVID-19 pandemic, with video recordings later made available to the public. Both in-person and online seminars have been extremely popular events, with hundreds of farmers participating in-person at each location or virtually for the online events. While in-person seminars typically take three or more hours including the presentation and the question-and-answer (Q&A) session, the online-synchronous seminar, taking place between September 15 and 20, 2020, with even greater participation from all over the region, lasted a total of twenty-four hours over five sessions ranging from four to six hours each. For the series of in-person events across the Mediterranean shoreline, the logistics (booking of seminar rooms, sending out of invitations to local farmers and peasants) are carried out by local branches (district directorates) of the Ministry of Agriculture at each town. Usually, local Halk Eğitimi Merkezi (Ministry of Education’s Public Education Center) auditoriums are booked to accommodate large audience turnouts, often ranging from 100 to over 200 attendees. In each session, including the online-synchronous version, a similar presentation (with only slight modifications made to slides) is given by a researcher from the Ministry of Agriculture’s BATEM branch, followed by a lengthy Q&A portion.
Having attended two of these seminars in Antalya and Mersin provinces in 2020 in-person, and the five-day online seminar series virtually, I draw on examples and materials from these events to describe points of conflict between extensionists’ visions and smallholders’ realities in southern Turkey’s avocado production. The extensionists’ push to produce the globally dominant but extremely frost-sensitive Hass variety constitutes the first conflict I identify between the Ministry’s vision for an export-oriented agriculture and the farmers’ priority of risk aversion. While the Fuerte is a domestically well-liked and safe cultivar to grow in southern Turkey’s climate, pushing for making the frost-sensitive Hass the main cultivar (for its export potential) does not easily resonate with peasants and small-scale farmers.
In both the virtual seminar series, and in in-person seminars in 2020, presentations included a slide on the global dominance of the Hass variety, making up the 95 percent of North American and 75–80 percent of the European market of avocados. In one of the in-person seminars, the presenter – while displaying this particular slide on the screen – shouted into the microphone on the stage: “You shall plant Hass avocados! Your main crop will be the Hass variety!” At that moment, I heard a whisper from the local peasant sitting next to me, “he doesn’t know the area.” The Ministry official giving the presentation admonished the audience to plant only a few trees of Fuerte, Bacon, Zutano, and Ettinger varieties to help with effective pollination of their main crop which should be the Hass variety because that was what the global market demanded. Uneasy whispers were heard throughout the room, and finally someone from the back of the room shouted: “Professor, Hass won’t tolerate cold weather, it won’t tolerate frost!”
The official made annoyed gestures on the stage. He then responded: “Who here has spent the nights of February 9, 10, and 11 outside? Did you all just go home to sleep?” No one seemed to fully understand what was meant by this question at that moment. The presenter continued:
I am talking about the nights of the frost. Who here spent those nights outside by their trees? Who here spent those nights burning brushwood by the trees to keep it above freezing at the orchard?
Only a few attendees raised their hands. The presenter continued: “Nothing is achieved without heavy labor, friends, you will work hard!” In a sense, the official instructed those in the audience (mostly local peasants) to labor hard – to self-exploit if necessary – in order to produce the frost-prone Hass variety demanded by global markets.
Demonstrating the extensionists’ vision for efficient farming methods, these presentations also include advice on building high-tech infrastructure to prevent frost damage such as overhead sprinkler irrigation systems – which use water for heat exchange to keep trees from frost damage – and wind machines attached to tall poles that circulate air over the orchard to direct rising warmer air back down towards the trees.
Local peasants I spoke with after one of these seminars confirmed that the high-tech infrastructure recommended by the Ministry officials is completely out of their reach – not only because they do not own large enough plots of land to build those infrastructures, but also, they cannot possibly afford the upfront costs of those technologies. In fact, the Ministry offers no-payback grants covering up to 50 percent of the cost of equipment and installation for advanced machinery like wind machines (to prevent frost damage) across large areas (60+ dönüm). Even with an effectively 50 percent discount, this type of high-tech equipment is impractical for most local farmers and peasants due to initial costs and small orchard sizes. As a result, in line with extensionists’ depiction of an ideal farmer described above, existing support policies often disproportionately favor large, outside investors to take on high-risk (and, potentially, high-return) production practices (in this case, by investing in the frost-prone Hass variety) at the expense of local peasants and small-scale farmers.
The targeted advocacy within contemporary public agricultural extension in southern Turkey for making Hass the main cultivar among producers (with pushback from local peasants and small-scale farmers) mirrors an interrelated conflict between extensionists’ ideals and farmers’ preferences regarding production being oriented for export versus the domestic market. Despite the requirements of export markets making up a significant proportion of production-related advice given by extensionists, Turkey’s domestic avocado demand easily exceeds its production capacity, allowing wholesale traders to sell avocados domestically at similar or even higher prices compared to exports. Given the geographically limited subtropical region along Turkey’s shoreline for avocado production, it will not be necessary for the country to export avocados in the foreseeable future – as it would be very unlikely for the production to catch up with the ever-increasing domestic demand. In the absence of actual economic incentives to export avocados, the extensionists’ emphasis on exports, while reflecting the opportunity area identified in the Ministry of Agriculture’s 2024–2028 Strategic Plan on “solidifying the country’s position as a net exporter of agricultural products” (T.C. Tarım ve Orman Bakanlığı 2025, 31), does not necessarily resonate with local farmers on the ground.
Based on my observations, attendees at the Ministry’s seminars become largely convinced to consider Hass instead of early-season varieties for future plans, i.e. if/when they start a new orchard. However, a large majority of local producers and fruit traders still favor the domestic market, with a preference for the domestically popular Fuerte variety over the globally dominant Hass – given the former’s cold-hardiness, long harvest window from November through April, and its larger fruit size appealing to domestic consumers. Supporting the latter point, a fruit trader I interviewed at Alanya wholesale market explained that the larger fruit size of the Fuerte variety is much more suitable for Turkish families’ habit of eating together, as opposed to a Western stereotype he described of an “individual eater.”
Finally, the third point of conflict between extensionists’ advice and local farmers’ preferred practices relates to orchard density (i.e. the amount of space left in between each tree planted). During training seminars given to avocado farmers, extensionists advocate for intensive farming with an initial phase of dense planting that involves a 3x3-meter arrangement at the beginning. Then, at year six, farmers would be removing rows of trees in between and thinning the orchard to a 6x6-meter planting pattern. This aims to maximize early yields when trees are still young. However, most local producers attending these seminars state they much prefer to use wider plantings like 7x6 or 7x7 from the get-go, arguing that even the 6x6 arrangement (following the intensive 3x3 phase) would not provide enough space in the long run for large avocado trees. In response, extensionists dismiss the value of large, high-yielding trees due to efficiency concerns, stating it is economically more efficient to work with a larger number of small trees. This contrasts with the pride that local farmers often take in their very large avocado trees that produce hundreds, sometimes over a thousand, fruits annually. However, I find from my interviews that another reason for the reluctance to adopt dense planting stems from the inability of smallholders to cover the upfront costs associated with capital-intensive techniques, such as 3x3 dense planting when starting a new orchard.
Overall, observations at training seminars reveal not only a continuing and strong disconnect between extensionists’ visions and farmers’ realities, but also a pressure placed on farmers for carrying out export-oriented agriculture through public agricultural extension activities. While the former point confirms existing insights on the top-down tradition of Turkish agricultural extension practice as well as its far-removed nature from peasants and farmers on the ground, the latter point provides new insights that high-value export geographies do not always emerge simply in response to global consumer demands but are actively shaped by local-, regional-, or national-level forces, which include, among others, public agricultural extension discourse and practice.
Discussion and conclusion
This study set out to answer two main questions: What role did public agricultural research and extension activities play in the recent avocado production boom in southern Turkey; and why has this production, contrary to assumptions found in the literature about superfoods creating unequal export geographies, remained largely oriented toward the domestic market? Findings reveal that the emergence of southern Turkey’s avocado frontier is not a passive response to global consumer trends. Rather, it is a contested process, shaped to a significant extent by a historical and continuing dialectical opposition between interventions of the Turkish state through its public agricultural extension system and local farmers’ agency.
A key contribution this article makes is by challenging the mainstream focus on consumption cultures and marketing in explaining the global rise of superfoods. Many studies locate the reasons behind emerging superfood markets in shifting consumer desires for healthy nutrition (Erler et al. Reference Erler, Keck and Dittrich2022; Franco Lucas et al. Reference Franco Lucas, Costa and Brunner2021; Sikka Reference Sikka2019) or in marketing strategies that construct and cater to these desires (Guthman Reference Guthman, McDonell and Wilk2020; Parker et al. Reference Parker, Johnson and Curll2019). In these narratives, historical and contemporary forces shaping production geographies of the global South often receive less attention.
This case study demonstrates that changing consumption cultures cannot be assumed to single-handedly shape production geographies. Here, publicly funded agricultural research, development, and extension initiatives as early as the 1930s have been shown to effectively prepare southern Turkey’s Mediterranean shoreline as a potential avocado production geography. This finding calls for the need to foreground historical and contextual factors in giving rise to superfood production and/or export geographies. Further, this finding underscores the importance of historical contingency in the formation of commodity frontiers (Tsing Reference Tsing2005) and supports the idea that local histories and institutions are instrumental in the making of global markets (Bestor Reference Bestor2001; McDonell Reference McDonell2019).
Analyses of two distinct phases of state involvement through agricultural research and extension demonstrate that while state-led efforts were indispensable in creating the material and technical conditions for the current avocado boom, these efforts have been consistently characterized by a deep-seated disconnect between the extensionists’ visions, imposed in a top-down manner, and the social and economic realities of peasants and farmers on the ground.
In the first phase of state involvement (1930s–1980s) the regional public agricultural institute has played a key role by importing and adapting commercial avocado varieties to the region’s climate and maintaining them in its nurseries. However, this period’s failed strategy for extension (1970s–1980s), with a top-down approach of targeting “preeminent farmers,” serve to demonstrate an early sign of a persistent disconnect of extensionists from local farmers’ decision-making processes. This finding aligns with critiques of the country’s traditional, top-down extension models that fail to account for farmers’ own knowledge systems and economic constraints (Boyacı and Yıldız Reference Boyacı and Yıldız2016).
The second phase of state involvement (2010s–present) reveals a shift in the state’s vision, but not in its methods and its lack of connection with farmers’ challenges, concerns and priorities. The contemporary agricultural extension practice in avocados, making use of widely attended public seminars, aggressively promotes an export-oriented model centered on the globally dominant but frost-sensitive Hass variety. This strategy reflects the Ministry of Agriculture’s goal of positioning Turkey as a net exporter of agricultural products (T.C. Tarım ve Orman Bakanlığı 2025). In doing so, extensionists frame avocado farming in a way that resembles the “miracle crop” narrative that is often found in the international development discourse, where a single commodity is touted as a solution for regional economic development through integration into commodity export markets (Bétrisey and Boisvert Reference Bétrisey, Boisvert, McDonell and Wilk2020; McDonell Reference McDonell, McDonell and Wilk2020).
More importantly, the production model advocated by extensionists disregards the risk-averse logic of operation of small-scale farmers and peasant producers who make up the majority of avocado producers in southern Turkey. Further, support mechanisms, such as grants that cover half the costs for high-tech equipment, explicitly favor elite actors investing in agriculture, while effectively excluding smallholders. This is somewhat similar to the case of avocado growers in Colombia, where government policies prioritizing large-scale, export-focused production are found to marginalize small farmers from both international and domestic markets (Serrano and Brooks Reference Serrano and Brooks2019), although in the Turkish case small farmers continue to enjoy access to the domestic market. As shown in this study, the preference of extensionists for large-scale investors, coupled with support systems that favor them at the expense of smallholders, provides further support for the arguments of Hall (Reference Hall2011) and Cramb et al. (Reference Cramb, Manivong, Newby, Sothorn and Sibat2017) that the specific outcomes of high-value crop booms are not invariable results of market mechanisms, but are contingent on specific policies and political decisions.
In the extension seminars, complex socio-economic problems are reduced to simple technical deficits or irrational decisions on the part of the farmer, which is a well-known and long critiqued tendency of agricultural extension globally (Cook et al. Reference Cook, Satizábal and Curnow2021). This approach erases farmers’ social, cultural, and economic contexts, including their risk aversion, economic constraints, and local knowledge. Any hesitation to adopt the officially sanctioned, scalable, high-risk production model is framed as a personal failing, indicating a lack of the right mindset, capacity, or education, which is a finding that resonates strongly with long-standing critiques of Turkey’s extension service (Boyacı and Yıldız Reference Boyacı and Yıldız2016; Demirtaş and Kaya Reference Demirtaş and Kaya2018; Ozcatalbas et al. Reference Ozcatalbas, Brumfield and Ozkan2004).
Another key contribution of this study is to highlight the continuing role of smallholders’ agency in determining production geographies in the last instance, despite systematic challenges they face. Most of southern Turkey’s avocado producers, and particularly smallholders, have made a rational decision to prioritize the domestic market. They favor cultivars like Fuerte, which is not only better adapted to the local climate (i.e. less risky to grow) but is also preferred by domestic consumers for its larger fruit size. Given that current domestic prices are often comparable to or even higher than export prices, and the ever-increasing domestic demand far outstrips supply, there is virtually no economic incentive for most farmers to take on the added risks and standardization requirements of the export market. This shows that despite extensionists’ discursive efforts to shape production and unfavorable support mechanisms for smallholder production, farmers here are not simply victims of global markets or pawns of state policy. Instead, local peasants and small-scale farmers are navigating these forces, assessing risks, and shaping the trajectory of their production methods in ways that make sense for their livelihoods. Their focus on the domestic market is the outcome of the tension between the extensionists’ export-oriented imaginary and the on-the-ground reality of southern Turkey’s smallholders.
Overall, this study contributes to the understanding of high-value crop geographies by challenging the common assumption that their emergence is a passive response to global consumer demand. By tracing the history of avocado production in southern Turkey, it highlights the often-overlooked role of publicly funded agricultural research and extension activities in enabling the initial cultivation of new high-value crops. This highlights the need to integrate historical and contextual factors when explaining the formation of superfood production and export geographies.
Further, this study shows the inherent conflicts and disconnects within the public agricultural extension system in Turkey, through the case of avocado production. It reveals a persistent gap between the top-down visions of extensionists who advocate for export-oriented production of high-risk varieties via large-scale, capital-intensive farming practices, and the realities and risk-averse strategies of smallholders on the ground.
Acknowledgments
I am grateful to Nil Alt for insightful comments, as well as to the editors and anonymous referees of New Perspectives on Turkey for their very constructive feedback.
Competing interests
There are no competing interests.
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