Food, Agriculture and Animal Husbandry Minister Mehdi Eker has said that the share of Turkey's agriculture sector in the country's gross domestic product (GDP) reached TL 62.5 billion (about $34 billion) in 2012.

Announcing the ministry's vision and strategic goals for 2023, the 100th anniversary of the Turkish Republic, Eker said that his ministry wants Turkey to export more food products by 2023. "It is our prior goal to increase agricultural productivity and rivalry in the country. Our goal is to have a country that has increased agriculture's share of GDP to $150 billion, that has increased its agricultural export volume to $40 billion, that has united its fragmented agricultural fields, that has a system that prevents fragmentation of agricultural fields and that has more agricultural power in the region and in the rest of the world," the minister said.

A series of measures have been taken to achieve this goal, he added. They are working on new legislation to prevent the fragmentation of agricultural fields passed down through inheritance.

The minister stated that improving the food industry as well as the agricultural industry is one of the key items on the ministry's agenda. Four thousand new facilities related to these industries have recently been opened and half of the money invested in these facilities has been provided by the ministry, Eker said.

As for irrigation projects in the country, the Southeastern Anatolia Project (GAP), the largest water and hydroelectric project in the history of the republic, is ongoing, he said. "Once the project is completed and all the irrigable fields in Turkey are irrigated, much progress will have been made in producing agricultural raw materials," the minister noted.

The first calculations for the GAP project date all the way back to the 1950s, and the project itself was officially implemented in the 1970s. With the building of dams and water canals that will direct the waters of the Tigris and Euphrates rivers to different parts of the region for irrigation, the majority of the project has been completed.

Turkey's agricultural population is 17.2 million, which equates to 23 percent of the total population, the minister said. He then went on to say that 24.8 million people work in Turkey and, of these, 6.1 million work in the agricultural sector. This means one in four people working in Turkey are in the agricultural sector.

haberler