Statistical Reform and the Remaking of Agriculture in Turkey

• In Event: State Numerology: Conceptual and Ethnographic Engagements with Numbering Practices and Ontologies

Abstract

Reform of agricultural statistics is having a profound effect on farmers’ practices and subjectivities in Turkey. Statistics are a crucial piece of the assemblage of human and non-human things involved in the large-scale transformation of institutions in Turkey in line with EU norms and standards. Fieldwork with farmers, statisticians and agricultural extension experts shows how changes in Turkey’s collection and use of statistics is central to how collectivities in Turkey are made commensurable with those in the EU, but not in ways in which this is explicitly supposed to happen. The new systems put in place to collect the data for the production of these statistics involve new reporting requirements for farmers. This, in turn, is having an impact on farmers’ decision making—indeed, their decision whether or not to even continue faming on a significant scale. New kinds of farmer-subjects are emerging as a result of encouragement to farm in new, “smarter” ways, enabling the further marketization of agriculture as a sector. This is leading to growing emphasis on “good” farmers—ones who use “sound” data produced by statistical systems to make decisions like entrepreneurs. So, in the name of technical adjustments merely to collect better data for statistics, agricultural institutions, practices and ultimately livelihoods in Turkey are being dramatically transformed. It is thus through the reform of statistics that a lot of the work of transforming rural livelihoods and engineering the comparability of things, institutions and knowledges between Turkey and the EU is being accomplished.

Author

• Brian Silverstein, University of Arizona