LEI and Wageningen International are collaborating on a project offering support to researchers at the Turkish Agricultural Economics Institute in Ankara. The objective is to familiarise the researchers with a number of research methods and to help them to raise the level of their analyses.
Since October 2005, Turkey has been involved in negotiations with the EU regarding membership of the Union. In the period leading up to the decision of the European Commission to start negotiations, Wageningen UR wrote a detailed report on Turkish agriculture and the consequences of accession for both the EU and Turkey (Oskam et al., 2005). The report indicates a number of points on which the Turkish agricultural sector will need to work in order to be ready for EU membership in ten years’ time. One of the topics addressed by the report is the relatively weak institutional organisation surrounding the agricultural sector.
Building upon the analyses of the abovementioned report, the Ministry of Agriculture, Nature and Food Quality finances a number of projects within the framework of the policy-supporting research programme ‘International Cooperation’. In this regard, researchers from Wageningen UR are involved in the reinforcement of information-provision in Turkey and in supporting the Turkish Agricultural Economics Institute.
In the spring of 2007, work was done on implementing four sector studies. These studies describe the current economic situation in the sectors and analyse the competitiveness. These analyses provide insight into the most important sector-specific problem areas. One of the final steps of the studies is to make recommendations for policy in order to help resolve the problem areas detected. It has been observed that the Turkish researchers are not used to working according to certain research concepts that we see as being standard. It has also become clear that statistical material, which is so important for sound research, is not always available in Turkey, or that different sources contradict each other.