JINHA

AMED -With spring beginning, Turkey's three million seasonal agricultural workers will soon be facing difficult working conditions, racist discrimination and gendered violence. Professor İclal Ayşe Küçükkırca, of Artuklu University, says there need to be concrete steps towards helping these agricultural workers form cooperatives to work their own land.

There are three million seasonal agricultural workers in Turkey, according to official figures. Most of them migrate together with their families according to the demand for workers and the seasons of crops. Women and children are a major part of this workforce. Alongside the lack of education and decent housing, the generally Kurdish workers face racist discrimination. Women face gendered violence.

İclal says the long-term solution to workers' problem starts with the ability to return to their villages.

These families generally migrate because they lack land or the farming implements to work the land. İclal says workers, displaced by economic inequality and state violence in Kurdistan, want to return to their villages. But the local governments and labor unions that should be engaging with this demand have so far been negligent.

"These workers need to be able to produce agriculturally on their own land," İclal said. "If workers can start working in Kurdistan, the ethnic problem will be solved. Then there can be solutions to the gender and economic problems."

İclal says small-scale village farming cooperatives would be a way of solving problems, but that discussions of these types of ideas have remained far too abstract.

(sg-pk/dk/fk/cm)