Turkish Village
Copyright 1965, 1994 Paul Stirling. All rights reserved.
Paul Stirling
CHAPTER FOUR
THE VILLAGE ECONOMY
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abolished this system in 1925 (Lewis (1961) p. 461) and eventually replaced it by the collection by salaried officials of fixed cash sms. Land tax was paid on whatever land a villager had registered with the tax authorities,which was classified into grades and taxed accordingly. In 1949-55 the real value of this tax had declined since the last assessment in 1939, because of steep inflation, and was negligible. In any case, it did not correspond with the actual amounts of land to which villagers exercised de facto rights of ownership. Animals were also taxed per lead, and in addition the village men paid a poll tax, the road tax, of T.L.12 (about £l 10s., or $4.20). This last tax was particularly unpopular, and fell very heavily on the poorest members of the community. I saw property seized by the tax collector from the homes of defaulters. The Democrat Party government in I950 abolished the animal tax and the road tax, and left the economists to argue for the next decade that the agricultural section of the Turkish economy was grossly undertaxed.
State agricultural credit in Turkey has an old and honourable history. The Agricultural Bank was established in 1888 and survived as a semi-private Bank until 1936 when it became State-owned. Credit was steadily expanded, especially after the Second World War until, in I950, T.L.400,000,000 (£50 million) credit was extended at a standard rate of six per cent (Robinson (1949) Letter 23).
When I arrived, Elbashï was already the headquarters of a Credit Co-operative which served a number of villages. This was not in fact a co-operative in any normal sense, but a local branch of the Agricultural Bank with special rules, run by an official of the Bank who lived in Elbashï. Members were compelled to offer mutual guarantees, and to contribute a small percentage of their loans, part to a fund to meet defaulting and part to establish their own share in the Co-operative. Members had the right to elect a committee, but all decisions lay in fact with the official. The villagers did not see the point of all this and regarded the small percentages as an imposition, tolerable because the Credit Co-operative, with its mutual guarantees, and its office in the village, was more generous than the old town branch of the Agricultural Bank had been. Yet in 1951-52, only I 20 households took loans, and many of these did not take all
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