Commodification of Global Agrifood Systems and Agro-Ecology: Convergence, Divergence and Beyond in Turkey - Couverture rigide

This book explores the shifting relations of food provisioning in Turkey as small producers are increasingly integrated into supermarket-led commercialized agrifood supply chains. Contrasting observations are drawn largely from Brazil, due to its specific historical, cultural, geographic-ecological, and social-economic differences with Turkey. These comparisons are used as a platform for exploring supermarket expansion as a multidimensional process in which politics, culture, and the economy form an interrelated whole.

The book employs a form of comparative perspective which allows the particular processes of market-oriented restructuring of agriculture in Turkey to be simultaneously distinguished from, yet related to, changes taking place in global agrifood power dynamics. Yildiz Atasoy explores changes in food provisioning in Turkey from a unique perspective that considers normative commitments to a market-driven model through processes of class formation and growing inter-capitalist competition which shape the form and meaning of agrarian restructuring. Based on original research, the book treats changes in food provisioning as an analytical thread, capable of uncovering how a supermarket model is entangled with diverse sets of political orientations, normative standards, and cultural practices. It also explores the culturally specific complexities arising from the ways in which the transformation in Turkey’s food relationships intersects with Islamic politics.

Yildiz Atasoy is Associate Professor of Sociology, Simon Fraser University, Canada