DOI: 10.17233/sosyoekonomi.2026.03.07 ISSN: 1305-5577

The Neoliberal Restructuring of Turkish Agriculture: An Analysis of State Forms and Class Power through the Lens of Historical-Political Economy, 1960-Present

Betül Sarı Aksakal
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This article offers a historically grounded and theoretically rigorous political economy analysis of Türkiye’s agrarian transformation from 1960 to the present, framing agriculture not as a residual economic subsector but as a strategically contested terrain where class power, state forms, and internationally articulated capital intersect. It argues that the persistent crises of Turkish agriculture can only be understood by unpacking the successive regimes of accumulation and the evolving configurations of state power that have serially rearticulated the sector to the global circuits of capital. Agricultural policy, far from being a neutral technocratic instrument, has functioned as a site of class struggle, wherein the state, as the collective organiser of the ruling bloc (first the industrial bourgeoisie, later finance capital), mediated the extraction and redistribution of agrarian surplus in accordance with the imperatives of accumulation. The study highlights how the internationalisation of domestic capital since the 1980s, together with the prescriptions of international financial institutions tasked with reproducing global capital on a world scale, catalysed a paradigmatic shift: dismantling protectionist frameworks, eroding smallholder viability, and re-engineering agrarian production along neoliberal lines. The cumulative outcome has been the far-reaching deconstruction of Türkiye’s agrarian economy, transforming its socio-economic role, hollowing out food sovereignty, and binding rural production ever more tightly to volatile, crisis-prone global markets.

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