Agricultural transformation and the rural labor market in Turkey

After five decades of transformation, the share taken by agriculture in total employment in Turkey had decreased from 85 percent in 1950 to 36 percent in 2000. Despite significant technological progress, total agricultural employment remained in the 8-9 million range during much of this period. The pace of transformation hastened upon implementation of the Agricultural Reform Implementation Project (ARIP) in 2001. This process placed some two million additional inhabitants in the "surplus labor" category as the share of agricultural employment fell to under 25 percent by the end of 2008. We rely on various data sources to trace the contours of this transformation and examine its manifestations in the rural labor market. Since the transformation burdens the urban labor market with the task of absorbing the surplus labor, we also review the changes that have taken place in urban areas to gauge the prospects. We tease out the demographic manifestations of the transformation by breaking the aggregates down by gender, age, and education. We find that the agricultural labor force is ageing at unprecedented rates as the young and women opt for nonparticipation. Women, who typically contribute to the small family farm as unpaid family labor, face the biggest challenges as the distinctions between the rural economy and the urban economy become blurred. Although there are signs that the rural economy took a more diverse form in the post-ARIP period, rural labor markets do not appear to hold much promise for the working-age population.