Associate professor Ferit Öztürk, Asya Saydam and Serkan Kaptan answered our questions about healthy food and running Bükoop.

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Boğaziçi Mensupları Tüketim Kooperatifi (Bükoop, Bosphorus ), working as part of Boğaziçi University, aims to both support ford suppliers and increase access to healthy food for consumers. Bükoop is an intermediary between the supplier and the consumer and it enables them to exchange on mutual trust, in the process building a connection between the farmer and the urbanite. Associate professor Ferit Öztürk, Asya Saydam and Serkan Kaptan answered our questions about healthy food and running Bükoop.

How did you come up with the idea of founding a cooperation called Bükoop? Can you please tell about the process?
Ferit: There was an association called Kentlilerin Çiftçilerle Dayanışma İnsiyatifi (KEÇİ). At first, as ÇIfti ve Sen, we held a meeting with academics, campus employees and a few activists from the campus. Our primary issue wasn’t what the urbanites could do for the farmer. We talked more about the ruined farmers, about the families that were forced to do other jobs because of the neoliberal economic policies. We also aimed at building a bridge between the owners of small farming lands and the urbanites. We didn’t come up with new ideas, rather being all intellectual people, we contemplated on what we could do for the small farmers’ associations’. We realized, instead of teaching them the solution, it was better to solve the problems with them, or at least seeing their problems and supporting them. It was the most important thing KEÇİ taught us. After that meeting, we kept discussing the possibility of founding such an organization and how to run it for about a year. We finally founded Bükoop. At first, it worked as the following. There was a cooperation of small organic suppliers called Kibele. We decided on a system that would gather healthy food primarily from Kibele but also from all over Turkey and we opened up our Bükoop hut. People would order from our website and we passed the orders to Kibele and other suppliers. Products would be piled in the hut and we would inform our partner institutions and later distribute the goods through them to the consumers. But after two years of working like this, people directly commissioned for the job got really exhausted, also the cooperation was on a seriously tight budget. We decided we had to build some other kind of working mechanism.
Asya: When the Internet didn’t work for us, we decided the hut needed to be open all the time. To keep it open, we needed people. Then we decided on volunteer system. Thanks to the volunteers, the hut stayed open for certain hours everyday. We were also able to communicate directly with the consumers and financial matters improved.
Ferit: When we had volunteers, people started following our cooperative more closely. We all formed stronger connections to both the supplies and the suppliers.

You aim at the participation of organized small suppliers. Considering every organization has certain connections to a main authority, what kind of an organization are we talking about here? Is there a grading system?
Serkan: We don’t really like grading as the cooperative. That’s why we avoid middlemen and try to buy the supplies directly from the producer. The system we want to work with is not the one where the supplies go to a middleman and then come to our cooperative. We work directly with suppliers and we know how that supply was grown and made ready for sale. Sure we sell our supplies in the hut, but we care more about learning about the cultivation process. We try to learn more about how other cooperatives run this exchange, think more about how we like to run our cooperative and actually establish our system on this idealism. We also work with supplier cooperatives, but the more stages there are, the more uncomfortable we get.

You have a database that enables us to reach the suppliers according to categories. What was your criteria while categorizing the supply?
Asya: There is an election according to how the supply was cultivated. It doesn’t have to be organic necessarily. But the use of chemicals is a criteria. We’d like to have no chemicals involved in the process.
Ferit: Since we started with Kibele, we were thought to be organic producers but the Kibele cooperative didn’t last. In the development process, with support from Çiftçi-Sen, the movement gained certain characteristics. None of us insisted on the organic. Almost we all knew that organic cultivation is so much trouble to the farmer. Secondly, organic certification is not the best working system. It went out of the way where it started 30-40 years ago, it’s industrialized and it’s politically positioned at a wrong place. Third, some features (like local seed) that organic certification doesn’t insist on, are very important for us. And fourth, the small farmer has another garden where he conventionally cultivates for his family rather than the industry. We demand some part of that garden. We wanted those farmers to keep their own way of producing and we were to buy a small part of their supplies. And as this business got bigger, other cooperatives were to buy more supplies from the farmers. This way, farmers were set free from the burden of the industry and it also was the way to a new kind of certification that’s decided on mutual contribution of two sides. With this vision, Çiftçi-Sen chairman Abdullah Aysu and Tohum İzi Association categorized Bükoop supplies like this; organic certificated, conventionally cultivated and food that is produced locally and with the wisdom of farmer’s experience. The third category is what we want. But if we have to, we can buy organic or if we really have to we can buy the conventional too.

Speaking of the Contributor Certification, can you tell us more about what this system is about? What are the advantages and what is different then organic certification system?
Ferit: Bilge köylü was a helpful element in the process of contributor certification. The system is also developing in Europe, Latin America and in some parts of North America. It works like this, the supplier has certain rules for production and they don’t produce out of their own standards. A lot of times, the supply can’t grow right because of the weather conditions. With contributor certification, the consumer promises to buy the supply however it turns out. In return, the supplier gets them chemical-free food cultivated according to natural conditions, as if the farmer cultivated for himself. Here, we plan to organize the consumer that way. If a chemical-free apple has worms, they are not supposed to complain or report it like they do to the supermarkets. They should know, it’s natural and it’s how it’s supposed to be. Abdullah Ağbi says “In a village, everybody knows what others do in their cropland”. Everybody hears about it if one of them spreads pesticides all around, none of them can hide their agricultural activity. When one of them is persuaded, they can easily inspect each other. So we tell the producer side that we are willing to buy the supplies that the industry wouldn’t but. But in return, they are supposed to stick with our rules and inspect each other.
Serkan: We basically call this certification system mutual trust. Organic certification requires a serious economic power. Suppliers are supposed to invest a certain amount of money each year for the certification.
Ferit: And sometimes they can get it without even having their supplies checked.
Serkan: It’s not something most farmers can bare. It also lowers their profit margin. We don’t support such kind of a money exchange. Instead, we shake hands on mutual trust.

Especially these days, people have trust issues about the food they are buying. According to your criteria, what kind of a process healthy food is supposed to go through?
Serkan: The process differs according to the kind of food. But the first things on top of my head are the traditional methods, drying methods which prolongs the shelf life of the product and supplies which are not produced in a rush. Some farmers want to shorten the process and sell the supplies to the market as soon as possible for more money. So they apply different fertilization methods. Or some farmers use pesticides and fertilizers. As a consumer, I don’t find any of these healthy. Back with the mutual trust issue, we also give the farmer the confidence that we are going to buy the supply regardless of the market price. We are willing to pay the amount the farmer asks for, we trust him. So the farmer doesn’t have hesitations to produce the healthy supply.

Are there examples of cooperatives like yours in the world or in Turkey? How are they important?
Asya: There must be a lot of examples both in the world and in Turkey. Each of them is unique. Neither the producer nor the consumer cooperatives want to establish a standardized franchise like supermarkets. Each of them goes through different stages from the early days of establishment till it’s developed and sustainable. They all have a unique nature. That’s why impossible to be another copy Bükoop. But of course there must be a few ones which have similar political concerns to ours, or it doesn’t have to be political. There need to be cooperatives who are after fair, clean and healthy food.
Serkan: I think the consumer cooperatives are important in the way that they don’t only care about the money but also for the health of the cooperatives. We at least, being Bükoop, care about the fundamental human rights of our customers, the right to healthy life. We also stand for the rights of the producer. I think it’s a strong approach because it’s mutual.

Lastly, do you think you’ll expand the cooperative in the future? Do you have any plans or    objectives?
Ferit: One of the most important things, Bükoop is not going to expand as it gets stronger. So the control and inspection among each other is always going to be in micro scale and pure. We kept talking about this in district forums. People demand we have branches in Kadıköy, Üsküdar. We are not planning such a thing. Instead, you build your own organization, we transfer information and we protect the moral core of the whole thing, staying pure and local.
Serkan: Our cooperative can sustain itself at the moment. Profit-wise we don’t need to expand. Maybe we can expand the variety of supplies. Since we don’t only aim at selling, we’d like to expand in the sense that we could share our idealism with more people and explain our motivation to them. We’d like other parallel cooperatives to ours to be founded, that’s also a way of expanding. We plan to get a bigger hut on demand from the students and use the space more efficiently within this year. Especially last summer, there was a serious increase in the attention we got from the public. We got help calls from district forums in Istanbul and from other cities (Diyarbakır for example). We are not always able to support them verbally or personally. So we are working on a booklet right now that gives information about how to found and sustain a cooperative.
Ferit: We support Tarla Taban Grubu, Gezici Kantin and Öğrenci Koopearitifi (The Students within the campus, and İstanbul Hepimizin outside the campus. We try to transfer information and we’d like to be represented among any group with the same motivation as ours. But healthy food issue in general can only be solved with local movements. Our expanding can not solve the problem.

This piece was originally published on Bant Mag. No:29 in Turkish
Translation by Ege Yorulmaz