Oil and honey

My ankle was giving me so much pain that my fellow passengers were insisting that I go to a hospital as soon as the plane touched down. I don’t know the reason why, but after take off, the pain eased.

In İzmir, despite my Tariş friends’ insistence to take me to a hospital, I refused, went to the hotel and tumbled down on the bed. The next morning, we found ourselves at the symposium, co-organized by the Spanish Olive Oil Producers Cooperatives and the Tariş Olive Oil Producers Federation. I was in so much pain that I had great difficulty walking, but despite my misfortune, I tried to concentrate on what was being said.

All olive and olive oil producers share the same problems: Producer cooperatives are threatened. They have difficulty buying products. The cooperation among them is diminishing. The lack of finance is creating big problems and they have no new models to follow. Agricultural producer cooperatives, especially those in Turkey, lack strategy. The need to buy the product within a short period of time wears out the energy of the cooperatives, a situation that benefits the interests of the big agricultural producers. Legislation in Turkey is not meeting the cooperatives’ needs. In Spain, although cooperatives have a market share of 70 percent, big buyers control both the Spanish and the European markets.

It is necessary to develop a new product-buying system for our region, including the European Union. To achieve this, it is necessary to educate the agricultural producers. We often see in the Aegean that olive orchards are wiped out and replaced with high cement blocks. The global threat and the joint forces of the industrialists have created difficulties for the global cooperative system.

To overcome these problems, a new management understanding and joint action for the producer cooperatives is needed. From this point of view, it is very clear there is a necessity to create a joint Mediterranean platform that would enable the sharing of information, and create solidarity and cooperation in production and marketing. Even olive and olive oil producers in the EU have preferred a NGO model to achieve their targets.

"Among all edible oils in the market, you can also find olive oil. It is the success of olive oil compared to what was happening 50 years ago, when very few people considered olive oil [to be] edible," said Cahit Çetin, the president of the Tariş Olive and Olive Oil Producers Cooperative.

Following the symposium, physiotherapist Görkem Dizdar came to the hotel where I am staying. Upon examining my ankle, his diagnosis was that the situation is serious and we have to go to the Thermal Rehabilitation Center in Balçova. At the door of the center, specialist physiotherapist Ms. Ebru Kaya Mutlu meets us and then finally eases my pains with the miraculous band technique. I feel so good that afterward, we go to eat fish at the Körfes Restaurant in Balçova. It is needless to say what we had to drink with our fish.

Not only in the Aegean region, but also around the world, the importance of olive oil is being realized. Everybody uses olive oil in every kind of food. Even in the United States, the best-selling oil on the market is olive oil. But here in Turkey, although the olive oil culture is a very old one, we still are unable to become the number-one producer in the world. The leaders of the sector in Europe are Spain and Italy and these two countries are keeping their leadership with the olive oil they buy from Turkey.

All of us have to reflect on the situation and find ways to solve it. For the sake of the market economy, we are slowly killing the sector through over-pressuring it or through political concerns about subsidizing it. Are we crippling it against competition?

As the ancient Greek king said, the Aegean is a place where from its plains runs oil and from its mountains honey. Nature here is very generous. But despite this generosity, even İzmir could not escape from poor urban development.