EU Enlargement to Turkey: Potential Effects on Turkey’s Agricultural Income and Markets

Turkey is officially recognized as a candidate country for EU membership and formal accession negotiations started in October 2005. Given the importance of Turkey’s agricultural sector, a Turkish accession to the EU could be expected to impact the agricultural markets in both the EU and Turkey. This paper provides an in-depth model-based quantitative assessment of the potential impacts of a Turkish EU-membership for agricultural income and commodity markets, focusing in particular on the effects in Turkey. Results show that the main impacts on Turkish agriculture would be a reduction in subsidies, producer prices, and quantities produced. A decrease in agricultural income, especially for Turkish crop producers (except for tobacco farmers), is also projected. In contrast, producers of sheep meat, broilers and dairy milk would benefit from EU accession due to lower feed costs. Moreover, the demand levels of most commodities are projected to increase due to lower prices, thus Turkish consumers are expected to gain from an accession to the EU.