Turkey’s Blue Growth in Capitalist Ruins: A Case of Sea Snail Production

This study explores a question how Turkey’s blue growth strategy is (un)sustainable by a critical examination of the seasnail trade between Turkey and Japan. Blue growth has been promoted over the last decade by international organisations and nations as an environmentally, economically and socially sustainable development strategy in the marine sectors. While the strategy aims for the reconciliation of economic growth and food security with the conservation of aquatic resources, its inherent contradictions and injustice are pointed out by some critics. This critical study is based on the document analysis of Turkey’s seafood production in the last 15 years and the fieldworks, including interviews with the actors of sea snail production, conducted in two countries in the 2010s. The Black Sea seasnail, which was once one of problematic invasive species, suddenly became a food commodity in the late 1990s when two countries’ capitalist appetites fed each other: environmentally degrading and economically declining Japan’s search for cheap seafoods in the South and economically ambitious Turkey’s aggressive export-oriented seafood production. Our research shows that the sea snail is commodified in what Tsing (2015) calls “capitalist ruins”: the multiple impoverishments of marine resource in Japanese seas, of Japanese middle class and of the rural households in Black Sea Turkey. Different struggles for survival in the ruins made unexpected local-global connections. The sea snail production is sustainable as long as two cheap resources, nature and women’s labour, are supplied. This study argues that Turkey’s blue growth is opportunistic, exploitative and volatile. Hence its sustainability is questionable despite its contribution to struggling national economy.