A century-old vision: A nation that feeds itself!

"The peasant is the master of the nation!" This is a well-known, much-repeated statement of Mustafa Kemal Atatürk, the founder and first president of Türkiye. On Turkish Republic Day, Oct. 29, it is impossible not to remember what Atatürk did in the early years of the republic and the vision he set forth 101 years ago to build a new nation from the ashes of the Ottoman Empire. As for me, the most meaningful pictures of Atatürk are those taken in the middle of golden wheat ears in the field. Such pictures demonstrate his will to improve agriculture in the country. Thanks to the bounty of those endless acres of wheat fields, the young Republic of Türkiye grew stronger and became a self-sufficient and independent country.

Atatürk's words, "The peasant is the master of the nation!" were uttered to strengthen the rural areas, develop agriculture and animal husbandry and ennoble the Anatolian people in their own place. Nowadays, looking at the past a century later, we can value and understand better his vision and the importance of his efforts to strengthen agriculture in the early years of the republic. Even before the announcement of the republic on Oct. 29, he called for the İzmir Economic Congress, held earlier in the year in February and March, in order to make decisions that would shape the economic roadmap of the new Republic of Türkiye. The congress was a turning point. The manifesto was clear. In order to be a truly independent country, we had to grow and produce our own food, we had to produce our basic necessities, and we had to be totally economically independent. Today, this vision needs to be revisited in order to build a better tomorrow.

The action was taken at once. The real independence war against imperialism was the...