Speaking at the Ziraat Bank Agricultural Ecosystem Gathering, Erdoğan said: “We work to protect our lands with all the values that grow under or over them, particularly grains, fruits, vegetables and animals, and to support our farmers who cultivate them.”

“The industrial revolution and the following technological revolution made people’s daily lives much easier. However, earth maintains its value as a fundamental source of life,” Erdoğan said. “We work to protect our lands with all the values that grow under or over them, particularly grains, fruits, vegetables and animals, and to support our farmers who cultivate them.”

“If you ignore the farmers, you ignore the future”

“In a period when our country’s population reached 85 million and the world population 8 billion, if you ignore the lands and the farmers who cultivate them, you ignore the future,” President Erdoğan said, noting that every global crisis reminds the people what a strategic field food production and supply is.

Pointing out that the disruption in grain shipments due to the Russia-Ukraine crisis led to a world-wide threat of famine, Erdoğan said: “We have averted a grave crisis for humanity by ensuring the beginning of grain shipments through the multipronged diplomacy we conducted as Türkiye. Surely, this situation has shown the importance of our own agricultural production capacity. It has been understood once again how felicitous the support we gave to our farmers, the conveniences we provided, and the arrangements we made during our governments. Our gathering here today is another manifestation of the same effort. We regard the agricultural sector with all its relevant areas, and its primary element, our farmers, to be a whole.”

“We are developing our policies and practices by taking into consideration all the elements of this great ecosystem,” Erdoğan said, noting that a disruption in a single link of the chain would affect the whole system.

“Therefore, we are taking steps that would develop the system as a whole without ignoring any link of the process that stretch from the farmers to the consumers,” Erdoğan said. “Our Ziraat Bank’s services toward the agricultural sector are similarly wide in their range. While we are strengthening the agricultural sector with new arrangements, supports and incentives, we are actually addressing the whole system.” (ILKHA)