THE GLOBAL WINDOW OF TURKISH FOOD AND AGRICULTURE The Global Window of Turkish Food and Agriculture Sector
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Press release…
Despite the pandemic, exports of furniture paper and forestry products in the Aegean Region reached 695 million dollars in 2020, remaining above the export figure of the previous year.
Aegean Furniture Paper and Forestry Products Exporters’ Association President Cahit Doğan Yağcı said that Turkey’s overall exports through these three sectors in 2020 realised as 5.5 billion dollars and seized the export figures of 2019.
Yağcı said, “Our goal is to export our products by increasing the added value of our products with design, R&D, branding and innovation and we want to increase exports by increasing the unit export prices.”
Stating that in 2021, they have an export target of 755 million dollars as the association, Yağcı explained, “With the Covid-19 outbreak, there are significant increases in the export of our products such as oregano, laurel, sage and rosemary, the importance of which is once again understood. The contribution of non-wood forest products not only to our exports but also to the country’s economy is very important, the added value arising in all of the production and marketing processes remains in our country, production is made without foreign dependency and every dollar that enters the country is reflected as a current surplus. As Aegean Exporters’ Associations, unit pricing of all our non-wood forest products is more than 85 percent compared to the average in Turkey, so we are proud of our Aegean exporters.”
New projects for sustainable production…
“We are conducting various studies under the coordination of the Ministry of Agriculture and Forestry for a sustainable production with the aim of increasing the production areas of these products, which are so important and producing them with the right methods. It is aimed to make İzmir a pioneer in this field by cultivating medicinary and aromatic plants and providing related industrial development with Kınık District Specialized Plant Production Agro-Industry Zone, of which we are a partner,” Yağcı added.
“Another aim is to reduce foreign dependency in the seed and seedling sector, which is one of the major import items of our country, together with the production in the project area. In this way, studies will be carried out to increase the production of local seeds and seedlings, breeding and R & D studies to obtain quality species and to find the place of ancestral seeds they deserve again,” Yağcı concluded…
