engleski

Managing environmental and business risks for sustainable avocado production in Turkey

Avocado (Persia americana), tropical fruit from North America, has become popular progressively. Its popularity due to its health effects, good promotion opportunities, and social media influence emerged an increased demand for avocado worldwide. The production quantities and harvested area for avocado production have shown parallelism with that demand by rising more than double for the last two decades. This growing production delivered some environmental dimensions in different parts of the world. While Chile suffered from the depletion of water sources due to excessive avocado production, Mexico experienced deforestation due to avocado producers converting forest to avocado orchards. Turkey, which started to produce avocado on the Mediterranean coast in the last three decades, follows the trends regarding increased avocado production. Thus, it is essential to approach environmental and business risks and the economic status of the avocado growers in Turkey. This paper aims a) to determine the economics of avocado production in Turkey, b) to assess environmental and business risks of avocado growers in Turkey, c) to recommend business strategies for farmers and policies to mitigate the detrimental effects of avocado production. Therefore, a purposive sample method was adopted with fifteen interviews, both: face-to-face and via phone call. The most significant risk factors were determined, and risk management strategies were suggested to mitigate them. The economic status of the farmers was better compared to other countries' producers'. The avocado farmers in Turkey are economically powerful and competitive in the world. The highest risks about avocado growing were determined as ; high winds, fungi, and sunburn for production ; robbery, change of agricultural policies, and lack of information sources for business ; supply uncertainty for export ; finally, depletion of water sources and deforestation for the environment. The most essential risk management strategies for production risks were windbreak plants, shade-net and latex painting, and agricultural insurance. For the business risks, they were security and safeguarding systems, agricultural insurance, and strengthening farmers’ cooperatives. Suggested risk management strategies for the environmental risks were water management, under- tree irrigation, using the technological applications for irrigation, increasing the frequency of controls of Ministry of Agriculture and Forest for the conditions of forests and illegal wells, improving criminal sanctions for illegal deforestation and wells, constitution of sustainability certification schemes.

Avocado Production, Risk Management, Risk Perception, Environmental Risks, Business Risks

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