Working Turkey's Hazelnut Farms
"We made just enough to cover the cost of getting there and getting back."
"Plus our living expenses. We returned with nothing [from a summer's work harvesting hazelnuts."
"I couldn't believe the mountains. It seemed like if you fell, they'd never find you."
Shakar Rudani, Syrian refugee, Akcakale, Turkey
"To form a working group, you need 15 to 20 people, and if someone is indebted to you, they are unlikely to leave for a different job."
"But we have seen so many people in the field who have collected a bunch of business cards and the middleman has just disappeared."
Saniye Dedeoglu, professor of labor economics, Mugla University, Turkey
"I've been doing this for ten years."
"Usually I bring between 100 and 150 workers north with me. Most middlemen take money and don't give rights to their workers."
Ibrahim Ergun, 71, middleman, Akcakale
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| Tech2.Org |
Mr. Rudani, 57, along with his six sons between the ages of 18 and 24, set out to work in the Black Sea region of Turkey at the largest concentration of hazelnut farms in the world. Mr. Rudani estimated that between them, seven people working diligently to earn a daily rate of $10, the family would end up with a few thousand dollars. After working the season in a terrain of steep inclines where his sons were attached by ropes to rocks to harvest the nuts, and coming away with no savings whatever, he knows they won't return for another season.
Nothing was gained but the experience of realizing that the promised $10 daily pay never materialized.There are about 600,000 tiny farms along the northern coast of Turkey which produce about 70 percent of all hazelnuts in the world. Most of the nuts harvested will be used in producing products like Nutella spread made by Ferrero, candy bars by Nestle and Godiva chocolates produced by Yildiz, a Turkish company. Gathering hazelnuts for market and export has always been known as a hardship and hazardous occupation.
Since the Syrian civil war and the exodus of millions of Sunni Syrians to neighbouring countries, the work has mostly been done by Syrian refugees, few of whom have work permits, and thus have no legal protection. Agricultural businesses employing fewer than fifty people are not covered under Turkey's Labor Code. Instead, the end-user of the products, the confectionery companies, are relied upon to police the crop and the workers' working conditions.
Ferrero, as a corporation whose reputation and products are built on hazelnuts, buys one-third of Turkey's harvest, and claims to oversee the prohibition of child labour and to set wage and safety standards. But the farms are independent and too numerous to be regulated, and the country's minimum wage is insufficient to keep a family from poverty. Workers don't even receive the minimum wage, since those who connect workers to farms as middlemen, pocket more than a ten percent cut,
"In six years of monitoring, we have never found a single hazelnut farm in Turkey in which all decent work principle standards are met", explained Richa Mittall, director of innovation and research for the Fair Labor Association.
With the ideal loamy soil in the region of the Black Sea, sunlight and rain, farmers were encouraged to plant hazelnut trees both to aid the ecology in a reduced risk of landslides, and to give a boost to the local economy. The region's workforce reflects a one-fifth agricultural component, bringing in seasonal laborers in various regions to reap the harvests. Of those laborers, about 200,000 are Syrian refugees.
Mr. Rudani and his family, along with the 3.4 million other Syrian refugees who sought haven from Syria's relentless civil war since 2011, have the status of "people under temporary protection", and as such, few work permits are granted, leaving agriculture one of the few sectors where work permits are not required, holding out hope for work and a wage for these people.
A farmer in Syria before he was forced to flee with his family, Mr. Rudani on his first trip to the Black Sea area, a 1,300 kilometer-trip from his haven across the border from Syria in Turkey was appalled when he realized how dangerous the work was, deciding the money he and his sons could earn not worth the risk, and returned. By the following year, they were desperate for work and earnings and returned with the resolve to work that summer harvesting hazelnuts.
"He [a middleman] told my father that this year the farmers are paying around 80 to 100 Turkish lira a day", Muhammad Rudani, Mr. rudani's eldest son explained. "But when my father got there, he realized that all the supervisors were cheating people. One of them told my father, 'We'll give you 45 lira a day, and that is it'." With little other choice, they stayed and they worked the summer gathering hazelnuts.
They worked seven days a week, 12 hours a day. And they're not the only ones. Other Syrian men with younger children, finding the cost of rental for shelter a heavy burden, feel they have little choice but to enlist their children alongside themselves to work in orange fields. "People who don't have enough family members to work are forced to live in plastic tents by the side of the road", said Nawwaf Ibrahim, 48, father of ten, a taxi driver in Syria.
Turkey's hazelnut crop is valued at about $1.8 billion in a good year, even as the farms struggle to be profitable. The harvest cannot be mechanized because of the rugged terrain. The size of the average farm is now less than 1.5 hectares, because farmers subdivide their land among their children. "The buyers say, 'I will give this price', and there is nothing anyone can do about it'," said Sema Otkune, a 70-year-old farm owner who inherited her 1.5-hectare plot from her father, in Akcakoca.
Nestle found in a 2017 survey that over 72 percent of workers reported they scarcely earned enough to get by, working seven days a week. Because of the Syrian war, child labour issues have "deteriorated in the last year". In the five years since Ibrahim Ergun left Syria, he views Turkish agriculture as a lifeline. "We are lucky. We can survive here. We will never be thieves. We will never have to beg on the streets."
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| AhvalNews |
Labels: Hazelnut Farms, Syrian Refugees, Turkey
posted by Pieface @ Monday, May 27, 2019
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