Mapping Agribusiness Support Measures in Turkey

Thematic Area:	Rural & Smart Agri-finance Development
Duration:	2017 – 2020
Client:	European Bank for Reconstruction and Development (EBRD)
Region:	Turkey, Caucasus & Central Asia
Country Coverage:	Turkey

Project Overview

The Turkish agribusiness sector is an important share of the EBRD portfolio, with more than half a billion Euro already invested, and represents a future pipeline in Turkey. Thus, EBRD intends to increase its work with Turkish agribusinesses and the government to support the sector’s modernisation and competitiveness. The previous study (Phase I) illustrates that support measures to agri-businesses vary significantly across sub-sectors and have impacts on their competitiveness.

The main objectives of the Project continued by Frankfurt School were to further refine the mapping of agribusiness support to selected sub-sectors, its value chains to feed into the technical and policy dialogue with the Turkish government in the agribusiness sector and develop policy advice (Phase II, 2017 – 2018). Phase III of the Project focuses on the design of a monitoring and evaluation (M&E) system for the Turkish agricultural support measures to aid ongoing dialogue with the Turkish government in the agribusiness sector and operationalise the M&E system with a pilot study (2019 – 2020).

The Frankfurt School expert team carried out the following key activities during Phase II in 2017-2018:

Development of a methodological note on how to assess the impact of support policies in agribusiness sub-sectors including trade restrictions in the form of tariff and nontariff barriers;
Analysis of agriculture support measures for the fresh fruits and vegetable sectors and the design of policy recommendations;
Analysis of the effectiveness of the tomato and wheat value chains in light of international benchmarks and best practices, overview of the challenges and opportunities for various stakeholders along the value chain and development of practical recommendations that contribute to market efficiency and competitiveness of the selected value chains; and,
Implementation of technical and policy dialogue with the Turkish government about the results and upcoming priorities for public and private stakeholders.

The Frankfurt School expert team is working on the following activities during Phase III in 2019-2020:

Designing the main objectives for the Turkish agricultural and rural support system;
Benchmarking the existing M&E system and available data in Turkey with European Union Common Agricultural Policy M&E framework;
Identifying data availability and data gaps for monitoring and evaluating agricultural supports in Turkey;
Developing a data collection framework to capture missing data in order to monitor and evaluate agrarian supports;
Designing an action plan to conceptualise an M&E system for Turkish agricultural support measures;
Implementing a pilot study to test the M&E system; and,
Developing recommendations on how to use the established M&E system to assess less distortive support policies.