Agricultural infrastructures: Land, race, and statecraft in Turkey

Abstract

This article argues that biopolitical infrastructures have been central features of Turkey’s ongoing colonization of Kurdish territories and populations and that the Green Revolution, despite its promise of progress and abundance, needs to be understood as part of this history of racialized state-making. In doing so, it joins recent literature that uncovers the local roots of the Green Revolution in domestic politics and land struggles in the global south, also revealing the entwined histories of accumulation and colonial and racial dispossession with agricultural norms and practices. Drawing on research in the records of the Economic Cooperation Administration, US Agency for International Development, Rockefeller Foundation Archives, Turkish parliamentary debates, and contemporaneous journals, I show how the Green Revolution can in fact be retold as an episode in a longer history of struggles over the distribution and use of land, the construction of agricultural infrastructures, and how these questions have been complicated by class, ethnic, racial, gender, and political divisions. The paper thus situates Turkey in a transnational history of agrarian development, while also relating the adoption of high yield seeds, pesticides, and grain cultivation to projects of land consolidation, internal colonialism, and racialized methods of state formation.

An Empire of Development: American Political Thought in Transnational Perspective

“…Just as colonial administrators in the Philippines had borrowed agricultural banking models from Britishoccupied Egypt, US efforts to create landowning and entrepreneurial subjects came into contact with the legacies of British and Ottoman empires across the Middle East (Citino 2017). In addition to transnational exchanges with earlier empires, American experts and companies implemented "domestic" Jim Crow methods of segregated education, housing, and labor control regimes in the name of development abroad; their projects contributed to classed, gendered, and racialized state formation in places like Saudi Arabia, Iraq, and Turkey (Adalet 2022;Pursley 2019;Vitalis 2006).…”

Predatory Fleas, Sterile Flies, and the Settlers

“…With the help of the theoretical platform of infrastructure, it is possible to bridge the discussion between the human and the non-human within the context of settlement colonialism. Agricultural infrastructure can lead to other things, create connections between things, and change the social and political order (Adalet 2022). In the Arava, changes have occurred due to both external and in-ternal pressures.…”

“…However, the environmental transformation inherent in agriculture, especially intensive agriculture in desert areas, generates a different level of environmental and political change. While other environmental infrastructures are more concerned with disasters, complex structures, or energy resources (Jensen and Morita 2015; Adalet 2022), agricultural infrastructure concerns itself with the connections between water, land, crops, workers, and technical equipment, as well as with territorial control, environmental transformation, and setting national and geopolitical borders. As a geopolitical enterprise, it establishes boundaries between various communities while also maintaining and establishing human‐non‐human boundaries.…”

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“…Legislative Weaknesses: Land ownership and fragmentation present significant legislative weaknesses [66]. Land parcels fragmented into smaller, less efficient units impede farmers' abilities to optimize land use and invest in modern agricultural equipment, thereby limiting their potential for economies of scale.…”