Turkey's cotton farmers slash fields as COP31 opens in drought-hit Antalya

Kabak, 59, has grown cotton on the same 900 decares in Soke for decades. This year he's planting wheat and sunflower instead, partly because they drink less water and are cheaper to grow. His input costs jumped 40% to 60% and kept climbing, he said, with irrigation bills rising even as harvests came in damaged. Fuel prices, in his words, did not stop.

The retreat is showing up in the numbers. Turkey ranked as the world's eighth-largest cotton producer in 2023, per the UN's Food and Agriculture Organization, but the Turkish statistics institute expects seed cotton output to drop 38% year-on-year to 1.2 million metric tons in 2026. A local farming group says growers around Soke have cut cotton acreage by around 60%, down to roughly 120,000 decares. Agriculture accounts for about 5% of Turkey's economic output and swallows 79% of its water — nearly half of which the government says is lost to inefficient infrastructure and irrigation.

Water is the crunch point. Turkey weathered its worst drought in more than 50 years last year, with rainfall 27% below the long-term average, and analysts call the recent recovery in dam levels temporary. A Reuters analysis of WWF and Lincoln Institute of Land Policy data found cotton-producing basins need to cut water use by 25% to 60% to keep ecosystems healthy. Fixing leaks isn't simple: water pulled from dams and rivers often arrives unfiltered and clogs drip hoses, and farmers balk at investing because new systems can dent yields at first or because they farm rented land.

Some help is coming. Turkey's October budget set a 40.5% increase for land and water resources management, with 174 billion lira ($3.5 billion) earmarked for irrigation investments, and the Agriculture Ministry told Reuters the private sector needs to add more. İşbank has opened 56 specialist agricultural branches and offers drip and sprinkler financing tied to harvest cycles. Şekerbank says roughly a quarter of loans under its sustainable-finance framework in the first nine months of 2026 went to agricultural water management and climate adaptation.

Gaps remain. Liam Chicca, Turkey country director at the International Fund for Agricultural Development, said farmers who must pay upfront and get reimbursed later face real difficulty — and the fund, which has put $850 million into Turkey since 1982, estimates 5% to 10% of Turkish farmers have virtually no capacity to finance major investments alone. The World Bank calculated in 2022 that a 10% fall in water supply could cost Turkey 6% of GDP, about $50 billion. Ankara wants companies to adopt water-efficiency certification and green-finance tools, an approach it hopes to advance at COP31. FAO's Turkey representative Aysegul Selisik has a blunt test for the talks: 'Success in Antalya should be measured not by pledges, but by how much finance reaches the farm and the watershed.'