Seasonal laborers make up almost half of the agricultural labor force of Türkiye and as their monthslong work outside their hometowns nears an end with the school year approaching, they continue defying weather and a tough life on the road for their livelihood
They have been on the road, in the fields and in the orchards since January. With the school year set to start on Sept. 12, seasonal laborers prepare to return to their hometowns though some will likely stay for more work to earn their "bread money," as they call it.
Agriculture, a key sector of the Turkish economy, heavily relies on laborers. Professor Sedat Benek from Harran University in Şanlıurfa, a main supplier of seasonal laborers, says some 2 million traveling laborers are in the agriculture workforce, which consists of employees whose number range between 5 million to 6 million.
Southeastern Türkiye where Şanlıurfa is located is a hub of seasonal laborers who usually hail from the region where employment opportunities are more limited compared to other regions. Şanlıurfa is third in Türkiye in terms of size of agricultural lands after the central province of Konya and the capital Ankara, but it still sees a large number of people leaving for all around Türkiye for seasonal jobs, from Adana in the south to Sakarya in the northwest. Some toil in onion fields while others earn daily or monthly income working in strawberry or apple orchards, harvesting the crops in fields near makeshift tents they set up, far from big cities and in primitive conditions.
A workday sometimes lasts for 12 hours for laborers, under the blistering sun but they do not complain as they earn their yearly income in the fields. They rarely stay in one province during the agricultural season and often travel to others for harvests.
A typical year starts in fertile lands of the Çukurova region of southern Türkiye for laborers who work in greenhouses and sow watermelons in vast fields. Next, they head to neighboring Osmaniye for harvesting peanuts. From there, they head to other provinces in the region before moving further west to the Aegean region where they harvest tomatoes or north to the Black Sea where they pick hazelnuts.
Sedat Benek, who studies the lives of seasonal laborers, says a large number of laborers are members of the same family and spend up to eight months working in the agriculture sector. He says that though the number of seasonal laborers decreased during the COVID-19 pandemic, their numbers increased again. "In Şanlıurfa alone, some 27,000 families left for other cities for work in 2020. Overall, we predict the number of seasonal laborers in Şanlıurfa is 300,000," he told Anadolu Agency (AA).