Frost, hail, heat sour season for Türkiye’s lemon growers
ADANA
This spring, frost inflicted some of the heaviest damage on lemon orchards in Türkiye, while growers lament that the trio of frost, hail and scorching heat has battered the country’s farmlands particularly harshly this year.
"At first, there was the frost, and we lost a lot of blossoms. Then we had a very severe hailstorm when the fruits were small," Turkish citrus farmer Aleaddin Çoğal told AFP.
"Then we were hit by a heatwave and the sun was so intense that it literally boiled the fruit, killing it," says the 42-year-old, describing a string of extreme weather events that have ravaged his lemon plantation in the southern Adana region, one of Türkiye’s most important agricultural areas.
"We lost nearly 40 percent of our produce due to these three disasters," he said.
Like many of its Mediterranean neighbors, Türkiye has seen a growing number of extreme weather events in recent years as the effects of global warming gather pace, with rural farming communities particularly vulnerable.
Mehmet Akın Doğan, head of the Yüreğir chamber of agriculture, said farmers were under increasing pressure in the fertile Çukurova valley around Adana, which produces about 40 percent of Türkiye’s citrus crops.
"Cukurova is one of Turkey's most important agricultural regions, which makes a significant contribution to food production and food security. But in recent years, the growing effect of climate change has started threatening our agricultural activities," he told AFP.
The extreme weather also impacted other crops, with apricot farmers despairing over the damage in a country that is the world's top exporter of dried apricots.
"I've been growing apricots for 40 years, and I've never seen anything like this. Farmers are no longer trying to save their harvest but their trees," said Orhan Karaca, who heads a chamber of agriculture in eastern Anatolia's Malatya region, describing the effects of the frost as "harsher for us than the earthquake" of February 2023.
