Kees Maris is a Dutch farmer's son who sees his mission as marrying the environment to agriculture in Turkey and anywhere else that will listen.

avi Deniz, the Turkish company which he joined 11 years ago, has built up a niche market in organic fruit and nuts. Although organic food is not the first business that comes to mind when one thinks of a developing country, Turkey enjoys several natural advantages in pursuing both organic and non-organic farming, ranging from excellent climate to cheap labour. "Turkey can compete because labour is cheap and there are clean virgin areas available for agricultural development," says Mr Maris.

Environmentalist zeal apart, entrepreneurship and the development of new markets is exactly what Turkey needs more of as it plans sweeping agricultural reform, reducing agricultural price subsidies and introducing direct income support for farmers.

The World Bank, which is financing a pilot project testing the effectiveness of giving farmers a single hand-out to spend as they like, found that similar reforms in Mexico generated an extra two dollars of income outside the farm sector for every dollar paid in direct income support.

But for any reform to work in Turkey, Haluk Kasnakoglu, an economist at Ankara's Middle East Technical University, points out that properly-functioning markets must first be created for land, fertiliser, water, and agricultural products.

At the moment, institutions such as Tekel, the bloated state organisation which buys tobacco at guaranteed prices, are being used to regulate and act as "substitutes for the market".

Today, agriculture accounts for 46 per cent of the labour force but only 15 per cent of gross national product.

Contrary to the trend in the European Union, which Turkey wants to join, Turkish agricultural productivity has been falling over the past ten years. Farm subsidies, costing the budget $4bn a year, are on the rise. Turkish consumers, meanwhile, spend an extra $6bn-$9bn a year on food prices kept artificially high by prohibitive import tariffs. And politicians have manipulated farm prices to win votes in the countryside with little regard for the sector's long-term interests.

Because of the backlog of problems, Turkish agriculture represents one of the toughest structural reforms envisaged by Turkey's three-year economic reform programme backed by the International Monetary Fund.

Apart from slashing budgetary outlays on agriculture, the ultimate prize of reforms helping farmers switch from dead-end crops such as tea and tobacco to new businesses such as horticulture is to remove a big drag on economic growth and exploit Turkey's natural advantage in agriculture. "There is no reason why Turkey cannot become the region's agriculture superpower," enthuses a senior EU diplomat in Ankara.

The success of new businesses such as Mavi Deniz is already encouraging. Today the company markets 18 separate brands of organic fruit and nuts, which it exports to the European Union. Its customers range from Nestle, whom it supplies with ingredients for Alete, a German-based baby food brand, and J Sainsbury, the UK supermarket chain, to which it sells strawberries for the manufacture of organic yoghurt.

That such exports have succeeded even before Turkey's customs union with the EU has been widened to include agriculture demonstrates the huge potential of Turkish agriculture. "There's a huge market in the EU for organic products because people want to know where their food is coming from," argues Mr Maris. "Organic farming is the only sector where you can get extra value, develop a marketing strategy and find customers."

In order to guarantee organic quality, Mavi Deniz insists on converting entire villages to organic farming. "We find farms, give them education and seeds and we organise inspectors to certify the food is organic," he explains. So far it has a relationship with a total of 40 villages, or around 3,000 farmers.

With sales of DM20m a year, it ploughs all its profits back into the business of making more converts to a profitable cause.

Other opportunities identified by Mr Maris include a big market for organic cotton exports from Turkey's impoverished south eastern region which badly needs jobs and growth. Mr Maris reveals that his customers for Turkish organic cotton include Patagonia, the US sportswear manufacturer.

Such business helps "kill two birds with one stone", he says. Anything that modernises the most backward sector of Turkey's economy and helps the environment will also enhance Turkey's fitness for membership of the EU. The bloc already faces a host of applicants with backward agriculture and a patchy record on the environment.


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