In the September midday sun, farmer Bahtiyar Kudu is busy cutting excess branches from his hazelnut trees in the hills behind Gorele in Turkey’s eastern Black Sea region. Its most famous – and important – son is the small brown hazelnut. About 73 per cent of the planet’s hazelnut production is carried out here and finds its way into some of the world’s best-known chocolate brands such as Nutella, Kinder and Ferrero Roche. This year’s growing season has been far from smooth, however; in early March a severe bout of frost struck, setting back production by two weeks and almost doubling the price of a tonne of Turkish hazelnuts on London’s commodities market.
But Kudu seems content, despite the bad season he’s just suffered. He picks up and shakes stray nuts to see if they have rotted inside their shells. The few remaining good ones go into a bag; those that rattle against their outer shells are thrown into the brush.
“I’ve only harvested 1.5 tonnes when last year’s crop reached six tonnes,” he says, echoing a refrain commonly heard here. “The hazelnuts burnt because of the cold [in March]. They froze over and they didn’t come together. Then it was hot and it burnt up in Ramadan for two days; it was very hot and the hazelnuts burnt.”
With thousands of young people moving every year to Istanbul and Ankara, Turkey’s two largest cities, in search of sophisticated lifestyles and better wages, children as young as 9 are being forced to pick up the slack in the fields.
At seven pounds per person per year, Turks drink more tea than any other country by a long shot. According to the UN’s Food and Agriculture Organisation, Turkey is also the world’s fifth-largest producer of tea, much of it grown on hillsides between the regional capital Trabzon and the Georgian border. The varieties are many, though black tea is the undisputed king in this part of the world. The tea is harvested from May until September with three crops per year, though as with the hazelnut crop, this year was a black spot, with yields down 15 per cent.
Gokhan Gumes, an agricultural engineer at one of state-run Caykur Tea’s production plants, says 60,000 tonnes of red tea alone are produced each year at more than 50 factories dotted up and down the coast. His office display illustrates the many and various types of tea produced here. Sitting across from Gumes at the Caykur Tea plant, Ertugrul Yilmaz has recently returned from Istanbul, 1,100 kilometres farther west, to harvest his own tea plot. He says young people from the Black Sea area generally go to Istanbul to work. “Sometimes they come back for the harvest. However, there’s still not enough workers and that’s why there are Georgian labourers working here,” he says.
“Fifty years ago,” says Gumes, “my father had three sons, so he divided the ground up between us. But the ground was not enough – that’s why people have to go to Istanbul.”
Out in the hills above Trabzon, Ali Rize Boyama is sweating heavily in the dense, late summer heat. His thin face bears all the signs of a long, hard season spent on the slopes. Next to Boyama’s house on a narrow byroad, four women load large bags of tea leaves onto a flatbed truck. The rural silence is broken only by the occasional sound of lorries being forced up steep inclines to collect freshly picked tea.
“The best situation for growing tea is when it rains at night and the sun shines all day. Rain is the most important thing,” he says. It was rain, however, that in 2008 caused several slopes on his farm to collapse, destroying a section of road and his precious tea crop. Boyama puts this down to severe changes in the weather over the past decade.
If the region’s hazelnut and tea farmers are facing testing times, Turkey’s Black Sea fishermen are in the midst of a crisis.
The Black Sea accounts for more than half of all sea-fish catches in Turkey, but experienced a 15 per cent decline last year alone, according to the Turkish Statistical Institute. Anchovy, the mainstay catch of the area for which locals have even created a dessert dish, has halved over the past 10 years.
In Rize, the Turkish president Recep Tayyip Erdogan’s hometown, the 61-year-old former fisherman Adnan Haciomeroglu is far from happy. “It’s the big boats with radar that chase the fish around the Black Sea; for the last 10 years, it [the haul] has got worse every year.”
Haciomeroglu had been a part-time fisherman all his life until two years ago. Now, he hangs out with his friends, playing cards, eating salad and drinking raki, the popular aniseed drink.
“Technology has destroyed the industry: sonar, plasma, big nets.”
Fishermen in this part of the world normally spend their afternoons playing cards and tending to nets before heading out for a night on the high seas. The boats work all night before returning to ports along the coast in the early hours of the morning, where their catches are transported to local markets and processing plants.
Trabzon’s fish market at 9am on a recent morning is a discouraging sight. Customers are few, and so are vendors. Of the market’s 17 stalls, seven are closed and eight have no fish on display – they are packed away out of the heat in fridges. In the 30 minutes spent at the market, a single customer visited. “It’s only been six days since the season opened,” says the fishmonger Engin Ozdemir, “but so far it’s been bad. The seawater is too hot; the fish stay out in the deep where the water is cooler. Hopefully, when the weather cools, the fish will start moving south.”
At one stall, a 2.75 kilogram salmon imported from Norway sits on display; it’s the most impressive fish on view. “We have to bring this from abroad because the catch here is so bad,” says Ozdemir.
With such challenges in mind, it’s hardly surprising young people want to leave, a phenomenon that has seen urbanisation become a defining aspect of modern Turkish life. Since 1960, eastern Turkey as a whole has seen its national population share fall by a third.
Though Turkey’s fifth-largest university is in Trabzon, a city similar in size to Dublin in Ireland, migration to western Turkey, to the bright lights of Istanbul, is a lure that few can resist. Around 300,000 people arrive in the metropolis every year, resulting in its population increasing seven-fold in the past 50 years to around 14 million today.
Pelin Cakiroglu, 17, from Trabzon, is in her final year in high school and is already fluent in English. “There are opportunities [for young people in Trabzon], but Trabzon is not enough for me,” she says over lunch at a cafe in the downtown area.
“I want to see the world.”
Pelin’s friend, 18-year-old Ayce Sena Akin, is preparing to study law at Marmara University in Istanbul next year. “If you’ve got money you can get a job with the government here [in Trabzon]. But there are no jobs for me; there are too many lawyers here.”
According to a 2005 study by the Istanbul Technical University, “the provinces on the Black Sea coast are defined as underdeveloped due to high outmigrating rate and low rate of income”. The International Organization for Migration says that, in 2011, Georgian workers crossed the border into Turkey over 1.1 million times to do the manual jobs involved in producing tea and hazelnuts that Cakiroglu, Akin and others disdain.
Most recently, the results of urbanisation have fuelled the spread of political unrest. Migrants from the regions who come to Istanbul typically cluster together in districts with others from their hometowns. And the Turkish government’s apparent refusal this month to intervene on the side of besieged Kurds against jihadists in the Kurdish city of Kobani in Syria has resulted in violent clashes in several Kurdish districts in Istanbul. At least one protester was seriously injured. Dozens more have been killed around the country in recent weeks.
Turkey has long prided itself on being able to feed each of its 75 million residents, but with Russia this month pledging to import huge volumes of milk and other foodstuffs from Turkey in light of an import ban on food from the European Union and other countries, nut and tea producers, already under considerable pressure, may be persuaded to clear their plantations to graze livestock, whose production is less weather-dependent, to fill an expected national shortfall.
Today, the fields above Rize and Trabzon are quiet; the gathering of timber for fuel for the coming winter is the residents’ chief concern at this time of year, as in years and generations past. What those same hills will look like even a decade from now is anyone’s guess.
Stephen Starr is a freelance journalist based in Istanbul and the author of Revolt in Syria: Eye-Witness to the Uprising.