"Local" Seeds in Turkey: Conflicting Meanings Between Preservation and Nationalist Discourse

This paper explores the conflicting discourses and practices around “local” seeds in contemporary Turkey. Following the global trend, the agricultural field in Turkey has been re-structured since the 1980s through the liquidation and privatization of state institutions as urged by the interests of transnational capital. Scholars identify the pinnacle of this process, however, as unfolding with the structural adjustment programs introduced after 2000 as well as the recent efforts to harmonize agricultural practices with European Union’s standards. While landrace/heritage seeds have long been in the process of substitution by hybrid seeds, the 2006 Seed Law more specifically forbade the sale of seeds that are not registered by official authorities, thus restricting their sale and circulation. On the one hand, many small-scale farmers and concerned consumers take initiatives to preserve, multiply, and disseminate landrace seeds. On the other, the government itself promotes a discourse of locality to endorse national biotechnology corporations. As the term “local” acquires contradictory meanings, scholars and activists alike, similarly to elsewhere in the world, often relate these changes to farmers’ loss of independence at the expense of transnational capital. Yet I argue that this narrative eclipses how the government of the Justice and Development Party incentivizes, by promoting a nationalist and populist discourse on locality, the development of a national agricultural industry based on Islamic capital.