Message From A Turkish Farmer, Arif Şen
One of the major problems for our planet is the rapid loss of biodiversity. And with every lost variety, cultural and social variety is lost as well. Over the last 30 years, even over the last 10 years, we have forgotten many things we used to eat and use from plants, they have vanished, along with the cultures that used to carry them from generation to generation. Many things that added depth and significance to daily life have been lost, especially in our relationships; social relationships, family and close friend relationships. Our children no longer play the dozens of games we used to play; these days the word “game” brings to mind computer games, with all their loneliness, wasted mental effort and pointless emotional discharge. Our children today no longer experience the village, neighborhood and street cultures that enrich the imagination and develop the mind in contact with the real world.
Just 25 years ago the village population of Turkey was 50%; now it is below 30%. We all know why: the advance of the market in everyday life, the inevitable necessity of raising profit margins through what is called “higher productivity,” which generally means greater quantities of resources and energy fed into the system. Villagers are persuaded by various pressures to surrender their autonomy and enter the marketplace. And the re-shaping of their lives is said to be compensated by the higher values of individualism and urban life, and the media-based, so-called “urban culture” so important to the “progress” paradigm everywhere.
Everywhere you hear them shout, Haydi more profits, let’s grab the markets, lets produce more, consume more, produce more, let’s go all the way... while the habitat around them erodes away unnoticed. At least in the modernized villages, everyone is quite aware of the consequences of the industrial agricultural varieties produced with chemicals for maximum yield, on their soils, water and health. Thus the villagers become the knowing instruments of the fowling and failing health of their own “nest”.
Yet I remember from my own childhood –when our village had no garbage dump, as there was no concept of garbage— the many sayings that kept our daily life in a healthy relationship with its environment: be grateful for God’s gifts; do not look with greed upon another’s daily bread; be frugal and thrifty; showing off is fools’ business; waste is forbidden by religion; not making do with little brings misfortune; show respect to bread, soil and water. These sayings are all, clearly, the product of another culture, a different balance, a different world…
Turkey possesses serious agricultural biodiversity! And we owe this wealth of varieties to the subsistance farmer, which is as much as a third of our farming population. Variety in the gardens, the fields and the kitchens is mostly found in the poorer villages, where the way of life is friendly to the soil, the water, to nature as a whole, since there is a conventional and religiously inspired respect for ones surroundings. This type of villager knows that she can only live well by showing respect and caring for her bread, her water, her natural world. And much of the deeper meaning of life is hidden in this gratitude and respect.
Traditional cultures, much maligned in the modern eye for their conservatism and social pressures, in fact as I remember it 30, 40 years ago, included checks and balances within collective horizons of expectation. The personalities that were formed in this environment were not remote from their ancestors’ expectations; their shared dreams bound the generations together. While modern village life in Turkey maintains many of its conservative dynamics, the cultural complexity, expressions of personality and collective self-confidence that used to compensate for these conservative aspects have been reduced to a minimum. In the more modernized villages, the countless socializing and entertainment opportunites of the past have been replaced by communications technologies, especially television, such that today, village life is many times more empty and monotonous than it was in my childhood.
Yet the older culture still hanging on in remote villages in Turkey, one rooted in respect and mutual giving and taking with nature; this culture that contributes little or nothing to markets, this subsistance farmer seeing to his own needs along with those of the natural forces that nurture him, is considered to be the remnant of a past that must necessarily be overcome and forgotten. Consumer culture has mounted an assault on this way of life in its popular culture and media messages; even the academic establishment joins the chorus. The point is constantly made that the only salvation for its hopeless backwardness and chronic ignorance is the City. Moving to the city to take advantage of its many obvious advantages and adopting “urban culture” is the best way for the peasant to prove that she is truly “civilized” (uygar, which means civilized and modern at the same time). Here the inevitability of the word “urban” in front of “culture”, signifies the refusal of the villager, the news of her disappearance. This news is also the news of the disappearance of biodiversity, cultural diversity, social diversity.
We, the small farmers of Anatolia and their friends, are working to transmit and disseminate the legacy and common values of the civilizations that have lived on these lands. We criticize the modernist view of the world that is being imposed, and struggle to keep alive and pass on what we have inherited to future generations. Greek brothers and sisters, we thank you for the richness of the agricultural life and culture you have left us.