Grassroots food initatives at the rural-urban interface: Potential and constraints in Ankara

This article explores how grassroots associations in the food sector, implementing practices such as solidarity economy and agroecology, have responded to the impact of the COVID-19 pandemic in Ankara. The COVID-19 pandemic had a major impact on Turkey’s food supply chain, and this was particularly evident in a city like Ankara, where green spaces and agricultural production have shrunk dramatically over the past 30 years. The grassroots associations were born in response to the consumption of land and the commodification of food chains over the last 30 years. They aim to propose alternative practices to the dominant policies in the food chains, promoting local inputs, the protection of urban agricultural spaces, environmentally friendly techniques, short supply chains and urban-rural interactions. During the pandemic, the practices promoted by these groups have proved effective and resilient, managing to find new spaces and attention. We argue that this resilience is linked to the very structure of these initiatives and highlights the fragility of neoliberal Turkish development policies in the food sector. However, these networks were effective thanks to the strong social cohesion made possible by their small size, which effectively managed the changes during the pandemic. Extending this model in the post-pandemic context poses difficulties. Moreover, although some of their practices seem to be valued and implemented by municipal institutions, there is a risk that they will be used to alleviate specific problems and lose the transformative charge that grassroots associations attribute to them.