TEPAV to Open a Food and Agricultural Policy Research Institute… The Institute aimed at building capacity will be established in cooperation with the US Food and Agricultural Policy Research Institute (FAPRI).

ANKARA – TEPAV is establishing a new institute to provide a comprehensive knowledge set on the agricultural policy design processes in Turkey. TEPAV | Food and Agricultural Policy Research Institute will carry out objective evaluations on current issues, train experts, and support sector’s stakeholders in their participation to the policy design process.

The letter of intent for the opening of the Institute was signed by Güven Sak, TEPAV Director, and William H. Meyers, representative of the Food and Agricultural Policies Research Institute (FAPRI) based at Iowa State University and Missouri University.

During his assessment, Sak stressed that problems in the food industry, which constitutes 10 percent of all manufacturing industry output in Turkey, could not be solved without addressing agricultural problems. He said:

“At TEPAV, we want to concentrate intensively on agriculture in the period ahead, because we believe that the chronic problems in the sector need to be solved in order to achieve the targets for 2023. Capacity in a field cannot be built overnight. We want to systematize the capacity it had started to build in the field with an institute.”

What will the Institute do?

The objectives of the TEPAV | Food and Agricultural Research Institute are:

- Develop and employ analytical systems to monitor agricultural products markets and assess the impact of agricultural policies;

- Release periodic reports on the developments in agricultural product markets;

- Contribute to current food and agricultural policy debates in Turkey via objective analyses;

- Publish research outputs and organize meetings to join together stakeholders of the food and agriculture sectors;

- Carry out capacity building projects in order to train competent food and agriculture sector analysts.