| as the net profit after small transport charges had been paid: see Table 3. |
| Table 3 | LAND AND INCOME |
| Expected | Home | Surplus | Cash |
| Reference | Donum | Yield | Use | for sale | Income |
| T.1 | 150 | 2,000 | 1,000 | 1,000 | 1,500 |
| T.L.(£187) |
| BA.1 | 60 | 600 | 350 | 250 | 375 T.L. (£47) |
| BK.1 | 75 | 550 | 300 | 250 | 375 T.L. (£47) |
| VT.1 | 30 | 350 | 350 (? debt to his brother) |
| 75 T.L. (£10) |
| (nb. actual yields in 1950 were well below these figures.) Income from other agricultural sources is not great. Ali Osman sells no wool nor eggs, but keeps them for home use. The sale of animals is highly variable, depending on fertility, feed, and inclination of the owner. A man with 10 sheep should get 7 or 8 lambs to sell a year. These were fetching 25 T.L. last autumn. Bilal has a buffalo cow due to start calving next spring. If all goes well, sale of her young should bring in 100 T.L. per annum, provided he can afford to feed them for two years before selling. On the other hand, a rich family with 2 buffalo cows, 2 ordinary cows, and 40 ewes, may make quite an additional income from this source, but even so, not more than about 1,500 T.L. These estimates are based on one particular year, and include an allowance for a poor yield, although the actual yield was lower still. Osman (AG 1) with 120 donum said that in a good year and with 70 donum on one side to sow, he might make as much as 3,000 T.L., but I think this was a boast. Two |
| independent answers to the question, what is the average cash yield of a landed farming family, gave 500 to 1,000 T.L. per annum. Further, a man from a neighbouring village, who sows 200 donum a year, claimed to make 3,000 to 4,000 T.L. per annum cash, which seems to be roughly consistent with my figures. It must, of course, be remembered that this is a cash surplus, after the year’s food, animal feed, seed and wool have been allowed for. Nevertheless, there are essential consumer goods not obtained from the land. Here again variation is very great. If there is no money, the people go without, without shoes, without sugar or fat, even without sufficient staple food. Ali Osman (BK 1) (4) gave me an idea of his annual cash outgo, which I reproduce:- |
| (1) | Food. Fat 10 T.L., bones 15 T.L., cabbages 5 T.L., rice 5 T.L., sugar |
| 15 T.L. |
| Total. 50 T.L. per annum |
| (2) | Clothes and shoes | 80 T.L. |
| (3) | Cooking utensils | 20 T.L. |
| (4) | Taxes | 40 T.L. |
| (5) | Animal feed (waste from oil manufacture) - 100 T.L. |
| This item is highly variable, depending on the amount of animals feed |
| sown, its yield, | and the number of animals to be fed. |
| This gives us a total of about 300 T.L. which means that Ali Osman can just about balance his budget, provided he goes without coffee, his women and children without shoes, and he buys no luxuries. But besides this annual outgo, a villager has a face two heavy non-recurrent expenses - house building and wedding. Marrying a daughter costs another - it may even bring an immediate advantage - but marrying a son may cost anything from 600 T.L. to 1,500 Y.L. according to scale. A two storey house built by hired stone masons, including the cost of timber, seems to cost about 1,000 T.L., depending how much of the work a man is able to do himself. Ali Osman has an old dark “ev”, no “oda”, no store room, and no room for his |
| growing son’s future wife, so he is already gathering stone to build another storey, to contain a new eve and an oda, on top of his present ev. Since he is not a skilled mason, each stone costs him 4 piastres. “If it were not for the building, I would be all right”, he said. He has had to postpone building any more until the next good harvest. Bilal built himself a small oda last summer, with the help of his wife and daughter, which his neighbours use liberally, but criticise for its poor workmanship. More serious even than the expenses of weddings and building is the threat of bad harvests. In 1949 no rain fell after April, and the crop was 30% of usual. Bilal had in all 21 animals, and that autumn was forced to sell 13 of them, for lack of straw to feed them on; he had insufficient seed to sow all his land, thus passing the poverty on to the next harvest; although his debt of 150 T.L. to the Agricultural Bank has not been called in because of the situation, the debt still remains to be paid next summer. Every household in the village was hit on the same scale. Hence, the partial failure of the 1950 harvest is acutely serious, since all reserves of the moderate to poor households had already been consumed in meeting the crisis of 1949. Only the richer families in such conditions can find enough to meet basic needs. The peasants’ economic position depends partly on government price police. On the one hand, the government does a great deal to stabilise cereal prices, thus protecting the small peasants from having to buy dear in years of failure, and selling cheap in years of plenty. On the other hand, the system of government monopolies, with prices fixed with an eye to revenue and political considerations rather than economics, and the very high tariffs against imported manufactured goods, means that the peasants’ purchases, even his clothes, are highly prices in relation to the primary products which he sells. The figures for income which I have quoted above are probably below the level of really good years. It is then clear that in the prevailing economic situation, taking into account the sale of animals and vegetables beside cereal surpluses, a moderate sized household with 30 to 40 donum can just about manage, in a good year to maintain the socially accepted standard of life, but |
| without any reserve for weddings, building, bad harvests, the death of valuable animals, or sickness. The middling villager, with about 60 donum, can give along all right, with some margin in good years, while the few owners of 100 donum or so have a tolerable living, and can weather bad years without serious hardship. |
| XII | OCCUPATIONS AND SERVICES |
| 1. | Alternative Occupations within the Village |
| If the conclusions of the last chapter are accepted as approximately correct it would follow that only sixteen out of 103 households can live off their own land without any supplementary source of income.(1) There is a good deal of guess work in these figures, and it is doubtful whether the conclusion is accurate. but it is clear that many villagers must earn all, or almost all their needs, by other means. In fact, many households send at least one member to the towns for work of some sort. But there are alternative occupations within the village, or within the neighbouring group of villages, which I will consider first. I have already discussed share-cropping, but as an institution rather than as a means of livelihood. apart from share-cropping arrangements among close relatives, several households depend on taking land every year under this system from strangers. In particular, four households, SI 1, VA 2, VA 13 and KA 2, made their living this way. The heads of each of these were respected men, well into middle age and all said that they had never gone to town in search of work. Two, SI 1 and VA 2, had a little land of their own, two VA 13 and KA 2, had practically none. Cemal (VA 13) had previously been the village watchman, and a shepherd, and Mustafa was shepherd the year of my stay. All these families were decidedly poor, except Kazim (SI 1), who had, by share-cropping, raised himself from the poverty which he would otherwise have suffered to a position of moderate comfort. One scale lower in professional status are the village watchman, and the |
| shepherds and oxherds. The watchman (BY) at the moment is a young man of sub-normal intelligence, and keeps this job because he could not do anything else. He and his wife and baby daughter live in a cave, and, apart from the kindness of neighbours, to which his office and his poverty give him moral title, I do not know how he avoids starvation. He earns 150 sinik per annum, which, with only three mouths to feed, would give him a very small margin for selling. He has a cow, no other source of food, no vegetables, no fat, no wool. He receives a uniform and some shoes from the village, but there is nothing towards clothing for his wife and child, improvements to his home, or other needs. Beyond very occasional labour in the village, he has no way of augmenting his income. He exchanged his labour at the harvest with a mason for a new ev to be built on to his cave. He could make a better living by going away to work, but although he talks a lot about this, he lacks the initiative to resign and go off in search of work. The village herdsmen vary in the reward they receive according to task performed. In the spring two shepherds are chosen, one for each end of the village, and two lads to pasture the lambs. These all receive 12 and a half piastres per month per animal, which works out at very roughly 45 T.L. a month, slightly less for the lads, since the lambs are fewer. After the harvest, since many villagers send their sheep away to other villages for pasture, one shepherd and one lambherd suffice until the snow falls. The shepherds this last spring were Mehmet (VA 11), who has left his father and has no land, and Mustafa (VA 2), also separate from his father, but still part of the same unit for production, who probably took on the work because of the bad harvest, rather than from chronic poverty. Though the amount due to these herdsmen is assessed in money, it is often paid over in kind. Cattle herdsmen receive grain for their labours. The rate is two measures per beast, 2 and a half for the water buffaloes. The cow her has to work from spring until the first snow, a period of about nine months, and the boy in charge of the calves works for the same period. Those responsible for the oxen only have to work for three months, from the spring until the harvest. During this period, the oxen are brought in from the fields, where they have |