Digitalization of the Agriculture in Turkey

For Turkey the GVA ranks the highest in the participating countries in the current report and is 8.034%. Agriculture is an important part of the Turkish economy, and it contributes 9 percent to GDP and employs a quarter of the labour force. Agricultural land covers the third of the country, and there are 6 million agricultural holdings (with an average size of 6 ha). Partly due to the favourable climate and soil conditions, the country has a diverse food-production and Turkey is self-sufficient in terms of agricultural products. The Turkish agriculture has grown steadily in the last few years, and the coun- try’s target for its agricultural sector is to be among the top five agriculture producers globally by 2023.

Turkey ranks 9th in terms of agricultural products in the world with 56.9 billion dollars in production with current prices in 2019, ranks 23 in terms of exports to 18.4 billion dollars. While 95% of exports consist of foodstuffs and 5% of agricultural raw materials, 66% of imports consist of foodstuffs and the remaining part consists of agricultural raw materials.

Internet penetration is just under the 50 percent mark, as about 47 percent of the population use the internet and almost the half of households have internet sub- scriptions. The number of broadband internet sub- scriptions has been growing steadily in the last few years and this trend will continue. According to the relevant indicators of the Network Readiness Index, the level of competition in the telecommunication sector is high, and it is mirrored in mobile coverage and in the affordability of mobile services.

Information society development began under the umbrella of the project “e-Transformation Turkey” in 2003 with the aim of coordination, developing e-government and facilitating EU-integration. After two action plans (for 2003-04 and for 2005), the first information society development strategy of the country has been created for the period 2006-2010, with seven action lines (e.g. social transformation, ICT adoption by businesses, citi- zen-oriented service provision, widespread and afforda- ble telecommunications infrastructure and services).

In early 2015, a new document was adopted: 2015- 2018 Information Society Strategy and Action Plan, the responsible entity for the strategy is the Ministry of Development. The main driving forces behind the creation of the document are the Tenth National Development Plan and Digital Agenda for Europe, because of the ongoing EU-integration process. The strategy has eight priority areas:

• ICT sector development

• Broadband infrastructure and industrial competitiveness

• Qualified Human Resources and Employment

• Adoption of ICT in society

• Information security and user confidence

• ICT and innovation

• Internet entrepreneurship and e-commerce

• User centered public services[1]

[1] http://www.fao.org/3/I8303EN/i8303en.pdf - last accessed on October 1st 2020