Turkeys Finance Minister Naci Ağbal on Wednesday announced that sugar factories will be privatised in spite of the concerns raised by workers and trade-unions.
Ağbal said that the government would work together with workers and syndicates in order to the growth of factories; however, the privatisation will go ahead.
Privatisation of Turkey Sugar Factories Inc. was also pronounced in "New Medium-term Program" which covers the years between 2018-2020.
Turkey Sugar Factories Inc. has a strategical importance especially in the sugar sector, economists say.
Turkey Sugar Factories Inc. is a public economic enterprise which produces sugar from beet and has more than 50% share in the sugar sector. As of today, the enterprise has 25 sugar factories, 4 alcohol factories, 2 machine factories, an electromechanical devices factory, a seed processing factory and a research institute.
Turkey Sugar Factories Inc. also has more than 150 local chieftainships and 300 beet purchase centre nationwide. Enterprise provides nearly 9,000 jobs. The 25 sugar factories on the list owned large tracts of land. Prospective buyers could use the land to build luxury residential buildings and shopping malls before closing down the factories themselves. This would result in more jobless people and less production.
"We should scrutinise the process of privatisation in sugar factories," said Ağbal, on the grounds that the privatisation of Turkey Sugar Factories Inc. is not an ordinary process and brings along many consequences in different dimensions of the sector.
Economists assert that the main issue is to decide which raw material will become prominent in sugar production. Turkey Sugar Factories Inc. derives sugar from beet and the privatisation of this enterprise will dramatically affect the beet production in Turkey.
After starch-based sugar production, sugar beet production in Turkey decreases from 20 million tons to 17 million tons. There is a significant conflict in sugar sector between the industry of starch-based sugar production and industrials who produces sugar from beet.
The privatisation of sugar factories will determine Turkey's policy on sugar sector which has essential importance in the Turkish economy. Moreover, workes of sugar factories and farmers who produce sugar beet follow the developments with deep concern.
Once among the world’s seven countries that are self-sufficient in food, Turkey is fast becoming an importer of food as well as agricultural and husbandry products, as the private sector increasingly taking hold of the country’s food industry. 400 billion Turkish liras ($115 billion) have been spent on importing food and agricultural products in the 2003-2015 period.
In the same period, the government privatised a series of long-established public enterprises, including plants of the Meat and Fish Institution, the Dairy Industry Institution and factories producing fodder, sugar, tobacco and alcoholic beverages. The revenue obtained from those privatisations totals $65 billion, or only about half of what has been spent on food imports.
