Minister of Agriculture and Forestry Bekir Pakdemirli participated in the opening meeting of the "Institutional Infrastructure Workshop for Land Banking and Bringing Idle Lands into the Agriculture".
Minister Pakdemirli said that through bringing idle agricultural land to the agricultural sector in our country, approximately 13 billion liras of annual income could be achieved.
"Institutional Infrastructure Workshop for Land Banking and Bringing Idle Lands into the Agriculture"" organized with the participation of relevant public institutions and organizations, non-governmental organizations, universities and other stakeholders, will be carried out in Ankara on the dates 14-17 January. Minister of Agriculture and Forestry Pakdemirli, who attended the opening of the workshop and delivered an opening speech, stated that Turkey have the potential to become not only in this region but also one of the world's most important centres in the field of food.
In his speech, "If you look after it becomes a vineyard, if you do not look after it becomes a mountain" said Minister Pakdemirli, President of Turkey, Recep Tayyip Erdogan said that there is a need to create a method and policy in order to effective and efficient use of the idle agricultural lands that are not used for a variety of reasons and left empty. Our mission is to realize these directions. Through this workshop we hope to identify the methods and roadmap to bring agricultural lands to achieve agricultural enterprise scale that has the sufficient input and to bring the operational scale to optimum size." he said.
Emphasizing that more productive agricultural land will be needed in order to meet the food needs of the growing population, Pakdemirli said that "Today, sustainable land management is very important in terms of ensuring food security in both developed and developing countries."
IT IS POSSİBLE TO PROVE AN INCOME INCREASE OF 13 BILLION TURKİSH LIRAS PER YEAR
Minister Pakdemirli expressed that the basis of the national economy is agriculture, and added "95 % of the food needs are met from the lands. In the developed and developing countries, various policies are implemented to strengthen the human-land tie, to ensure the efficient use of agricultural land. On the other hand in our country, 8.3 % of the 24 million hectares of agricultural land, which is equal to 2 million hectares, are idle. 25 % of these agricultural lands have the feasibility for irrigation. It is equal to an area of approximately 500 thousand hectares. It is possible to provide an income increase of 13 billion Turkish liras in case of 2 million hectares land is brought into agriculture."
8.5 MILLION HECTARES WILL BE CONSOLIDATED UNTIL 2023
Pakdemirli said that in order to protect the agricultural lands and to eliminate the legal gap, they have issued the Law on Land Conservation and Land Use in 2005 and added: "This arrangement has prevented the misuse of 655 thousand hectares of agricultural lands. We have completed consolidation of a total of 6.1 million hectares to date and 496 thousand hectares as of the end of 2018. We will complete the consolidation works on 8.5 million hectares by 2023."
2 MILLION HECTARES OF IDLE AGRICULTURAL LANDS WILL BE BROUGHT INTO PRODUCTION
Minister Pakdemirli noted that efforts are carried out to be implement the models such as land banking that in Turkey and said: "Through realizing producibility of aforementioned lands, there will be agricultural establishments that are suitable for the scale economy, agricultural production will be safer and more secure in terms of quality and quantity. Through this implementation, transferring opportunities of these lands will be revealed in order to protect the agricultural quality of these lands. In addition to this, the mobility of agricultural lands, which means buying, selling and renting, will be increased. Thus more efficient use of agricultural land by the user and 2 million hectares of idle agricultural lands in our country will be brought into production through the regulation of the supply and demand balance in the agricultural land market."