DEVELOPMENT: When Just Three Sheep can Transform a Life

By IPS Correspondents Reprint | | Print |

Hilmi Toros

SAHGELDI, Turkey, Aug 30 1998 (IPS) - Born into poverty, ‘virtual widow’ Gulustan Ircap would normally have been destined to die in it, but she says she now has a glimmer of hope for her life in this hamlet in Turkey’s remote eastern region: she now owns three sheep, her first legal possessions.

And, soon, she expects to sell their milk and cheese to earn money for the first time ever.

For Gulustan, a mother of four infants, is a typical Anatolian ‘seasonal village widow’, most of whom own and earn nothing. Her 36-year-old husband Kutbettin also found no income in this 60- mudhouse hamlet, so he wanders in search of day work in Istanbul, Turkey’s commercial hub, some 2,000 kilometres and a world away.

“What he earns when he finds work is hardly enough for him,” a smiling Gulustan says, breaking tradition and talking face-to- face to a male stranger. “If he can save something, he brings it here and stays with us during three winter months.”

Mostly, the diminutive Gulustan gets by without money. She and her children survive on milk and cheese from a cow the family has inherited, plus bread and occasionally meat from neighbours in the hamlet of 375 people (80 percent women and children).

Here, there are no shops because nobody can afford to buy anything. Bare subsistence and self-sufficiency go hand in hand: all necessities of life must be obtained on site. Trees are grown to supply roofs for mud-and-stone huts; cow manure is packed for heating and cooking; water from a single village pump is shared.

Gulustan is one of 30 village women who were given four sheep each (one of hers died) from funds donated by people worldwide through last year’s global TeleFood television appeal by the Rome- based U.N. Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO).

TeleFood funds are now financing low-cost (all under 10,000 U.S. dollars) high-impact projects to boost local food production in selected parts of Asia, Africa, the Near East, Eastern Europe, Latin America and the Caribbean.

The project in Sahgeldi (the name means ‘The Shah Came Here’ in reference to the presumed visit of a Shah of Iran in times past) has targeted not only the poorest of the poor, but also women.

While women produce over 60 percent of food in developing countries, their status and well-being are often overlooked. The FAO is waging a global campaign this year to improve the lot of rural women under the theme of ‘Women Feed the World’. The campaign will culminate on World Food Day, Oct. 16.

The legal owners of the donated sheep are now Gulustan and other Sahgeldi women villagers. They will make a career out of their sheep, not only raising and breeding them, but also growing the feed for fattening them on nearby government land.

If Gulustan’s travails are typical of poverty-stricken women in thousands of such hamlets, her situation also stands out more as an exception than the rule in a country noted for its farming prowess and potential.

Turkey ranks alongside the United States, India, Canada and France in wheat production and is the world’s top hazelnut producer. Half the workforce in this nation of 65 million people is involved in agriculture and they grow anything and everything on its vast expanse of land.

Asked what she will do with her first income, a puzzled Gulustan replies: “I never thought about it. I am not used to earning money.”

Muhtar (elected village alderman) Sefik Demirel does not rule out that women, as they become “entrepreneurs,” may unite and take their milk and cheese and ‘ayran’ – a beverage made from yoghurt, water and salt – to the bustling agricultural market in nearby Van, a city of 150,000 and once the capital of the Urartian Civilisation (7-8th century BC).

Some 1,000 kilometres west of this hamlet and the gentle slopes and rugged cliffs of the eastern region, the scenery is different in the villages of Kupluce and Dulgerler south of historic Konya, inhabited without interruption since 3,000 BC – from the Hittites to the Persians, from Alexander the Great to the Ottoman Turks.

But the problem of forest villages along the towering Toros (Taurus) Mountains is the same: rural poverty with ‘seasonal village widows’ without noticeable income.

There, with a small contribution of just 2,000 dollars from global TeleFood funds, some 160 families have been given seeds and scions to grow cherry, peach and apple trees.

They are being trained to grow them in a nursery and will sell the young plants for the equivalent of just under 20 dollars each to other farmers who will then replant them.

These farmers could earn 300 dollars per cherry tree per season when they eventually bear fruit.