To pay for all this, the villages have been growing as much grain for market as possible, and also exporting their traditional products; cheese, milk, wool, livestock, kilims and woven bags. -Elbashï, by great expansion of the area under cultivation, has managed more or less to balance its trade, but like most villages, Sakaltutan has been forced to export labour on a large scale as well.
In spite of the rise in consumption and in earnings by both villages, there is little investment in agriculture. Very few of the village imports are directed to agricultural production, unless we count the materials for making the primitive tools. Recently, people have been buying steel ploughs, and one man in Elbashï by 1955 had bought on credit a tractor and a set of agricultural equipment. But no one even thought about the means of raising the very low yields per dönüm.
The villages are homogeneous in production, and economic relations between them consist mainly of reciprocal exchanges and small loans, the use of craftsmen, advice on health and medicines for people and animals, religious and magical consultations, and sales of animals. The vast bulk of village buying and selling is with the towns. In spite of the village illusions that land makes a farmer independent in a way that mere earners of cash are not, the village is in fact directly and completely tied into the national economy.
In theory economic dependence is a two-way relationship. If the villages depend on the towns for their survival, so also do the towns depend on the villages for food and labour. But in fact even in purely economic terms, the townsmen with their greater concentration of wealth are always stronger in specific instances than the villagers, who are normally too near to serious want to take risks, and too numerous and divided to use the weapon of cutting off urban food supplies, or withholding labour.
It is a commonplace that the economic System of relatively