Word: turkeys
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Dates: during 1950-1959
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...Turkey in 1950 still had something close to a colonial economy. Despite its coal, iron and water power, it remained an industrial pygmy, earned most of its foreign exchange by exporting tobacco, cereals, filberts, raisins, figs and chrome ore. More than 65% of Turkey's 20 million citizens were still illiterate. Four out of five of the nation's 36,000 rural villages had no proper drinking water. More than half of Turkey's 27,000 miles of "highway" were officially listed as "passable by carts during the dry season only." And Turkey's peasants...
Boldly, Adnan Menderes set out to alter all this-at first by his announced program of relying on free enterprise. He rewrote Turkey's laws to encourage foreign investment by such means as easy profit transfers and the promise of generous exploitation terms to anyone who found oil. He encouraged private investment in textile production and light industry. Among his first acts was abolition of the rigid import controls that the Republicans had established at the beginning of World War II. The consequence was that the Turks, starved for almost a decade for the products of Western industry, began...
...impatient to wait for private enterprise to work its measured miracles, Menderes concurrently embarked on an immense government development program. Without much regard for cost, he opened new coal mines, expanded Turkey's single steel complex, constructed a dozen beet-sugar plants, started work on six huge new dams and threw up 1,250 miles of power lines-nearly seven times as many as there were in all Turkey in 1950. Above all, he concentrated on improving the lot of the peasants. He boosted crop subsidies, imported (with U.S. aid) 40,000 tractors, and between 1950 and 1956 increased...
...Debt Pyramid. At first, Menderes' development program had nothing but happy results. Acreage under cultivation doubled. In 1953, when good weather gave it the biggest wheat crop in history -8,200,000 tons v. 3,800,000 in 1950-Turkey became for the first time a substantial exporter of wheat. The once arid Anatolian plateau was dotted with green fields and bustling communities, and the cotton-producing areas of southern Turkey experienced a new prosperity. Turkey's sugar production, which nearly trebled between 1950 and 1956, was barely able to keep pace with domestic demand. Reason: the Turkish...
...weeks of its opening because no. sugar beets were grown in the area. Even more bitterly, they accused him of using development funds as a bottomless pork barrel with which to woo the peasant vote-a charge at least partly borne out last year when Menderes swept along Turkey's Black Sea coast in a pre-election tour passing out promises of sugar mills, cement factories and port improvements with all the abandon of a new father distributing cigars...