Ziya Kaya
Grant Type
Dissertation Fieldwork GrantInstitutional Affiliation
Arizona, U. ofGrant number
Gr. 10227Approve Date
October 7, 2021Project Title
Kaya, Ziya (Arizona, U. of) "“Who Is Going to Feed All These People?” From Food Security to the Securitization of Food Production in Turkey"ZIYA KAYA, then a graduate student at University of Arizona, Tucson, Arizona, was awarded funding in October 2021 to aid research on ““Who Is Going to Feed All These People?’ From Food Security to the Securitization of Food Production in Turkey,” supervised by Dr. Brian Silverstein. In the course of fieldwork with farmers, digital farming technology companies, and technicians in Turkey, one company posted that phrase “Less is More” on their website to promote how their digital soil analysis technologies help farmers get greater yields using less fertilizer. In many countries around the world, longstanding concerns about food security and ecological and socioeconomic sustainability have only been compounded by climate change, and in this context many countries are redoubling their efforts to reform their agro-food sectors. In Turkey, this is taking the form of digital “smart” farming technologies (e.g. drones, auto-steering, GIS, smartphones, sensors, Big Data) seeing rapid and intensive investment, for increasing efficiency (more food from less land) and environmental sustainability, while addressing rural incomes. Such techno-political interventions produce unanticipated and unacknowledged transformations of farmers, their outlooks and practices, and human/non-human relations. Through ethnographic research conducted over 18 months (6 months funded by Wenner-Gren) in Turkey, this study shows that digital farming technologies, designed to enhance food security and ecological well-being, have led to the financialization and securitization of food production as well as a proliferation of mistrust in agrarian environments.