MÜSİAD IĞDIR OPENING PROGRAMME

01 September 2021

Honourable Governor,

Honourable Rector,

Honourable Provincial Police Chief

Honourable Mufti,

Provincial Chairs of the Political Parties,

Of the Iğdır Business World,

Esteemed Presidents and Representatives of the Chambers, Commodity Exchanges and NGOs,

Esteemed Members of the MÜSİAD Board of Directors, our High Board President,

Our Branch Presidents Who Have Come from Neighbouring Provinces (Kars)

The Esteemed President and Members of our Iğdır Representative Office,

Esteemed Members of the Press,

Ladies and Gentlemen

Here in Iğdır, where we have come together on the occasion of the opening of our representative office, I respectfully greet you; welcome, you have brought joy with you.

Distinguished Guests, Valued Friends,

MÜSİAD is a rarely equalled capital platform that spans Türkiye and indeed the world from end to end and is the most effective and the most widespread in the field. With this quality it has penetrated to the very capillaries of our country, both economically and socially, and it advances with the strength that comes from commanding even the finest field knowledge.

During my term of office I have visited 80 of our provinces and 7 of our large districts. Last week we opened our Hakkari Yüksekova representative office. Today it has been our lot to open Iğdır. And tomorrow we will open the new service building of our Kars representative office.

With its ever-growing presence in the field, MÜSİAD is a capital ambassador, an investment agency and an institution of commercial and economic diplomacy for our country both at home and abroad, and indeed, when it comes to relations between states, a voluntary platform in preparing the diplomatic ground for multilateral economic and commercial relations.

It is not only our reach: with the renewal process we underwent 2.5 years ago, that is, in order to adapt to our changing state-government system, and with our committees and their projects, which address the fundamental strategic elements of the new world order and undertake work that will increase new Türkiye's role as a voice on the world's geopolitical atlas, MÜSİAD is now a superstructure under whose single roof capital of every scale is gathered.

MÜSİAD is a capital platform that is the pioneer of domestic and national industry in our country, that gives priority to the creation of the national capital stock and that indeed builds it.

The fact that the strategic goals we designed and voiced 2.5 years ago, and these elements which we subsequently gave concrete form to one by one through the names of our committees, appear before us in today's world as a series of global objectives makes us proud in terms of the breadth of our foresight, our command of strategic reasoning, and the scale of the services we will render and are rendering to our state.

Indeed, in this regard, since the day we took office we have always underlined, within the framework of the two slogans we determined, that we are and will remain in the service of our state and at the side of our nation. The first of these was the motto “TOGETHER”.

Whatever we do, whatever we produce, whatever we must stand up to, we said we would do it together for this country. And we said that we are ready to walk together with everyone whose cause is Türkiye.

Our second motto was “WE ARE HERE”. In the same way, from science to art, from industry to education, from employment to the growth of SME businesses, from institutionalization to project generation, we said we are here in every field, in every field our country needs, and at all times.

It is an institution that, not only in the economic field, does not forget high morality, virtue, the Akhi culture, and help for those in straits, such as Qard al-Hasan and the zimem ledger. During the lockdown periods when the pandemic was at its height, it also showed through its aid in the field that it stood beside the business world and beside our low-income people.

Distinguished Guests,

In 2020 many countries were shaken economically and socially because of the pandemic. Our country, however, drew a successful recovery curve after the initial shock, and today we are successfully sustaining that curve.

These days, praise be to God, the conditions of normalization we have moved into, as a result both of the steadily increasing effect of vaccination and of the effective policies our state has applied in managing the pandemic, are finally bringing us together again. The full normalization we entered with the month of July will be reflected positively both in our economic life and in our social peace — and when we look at the growth figures, we see that it has indeed been reflected.

In the first quarter of 2021 we grew by %7, and in the second quarter we achieved growth at a rate of %23.

During the pandemic and afterwards a new world economic system developed, and with the effect of global climate change and of drought, new living conditions emerged. This new situation showed us realities that we may sum up as being able to fend for oneself and to be self-sufficient.

In this respect, as Türkiye we must now focus on developing appropriate strategies and road maps so that we may take our rightful share of the trade and investment environment that has developed after the process which began with the pandemic.

As in every difficult period, in this process too we, as business people, must focus on new investments and on increasing our trade potential in order to contribute to our country's recovery process.

As MÜSİAD, we know that our contribution to this effort is great, thanks to our organizational network which we have expanded with great care and to the strong trade network and commercial relations that our branches and representative offices have established in their regions.

With the hope that the branch we are opening here today will also engage in productive work that contributes to its region and to our country, I wish that it may bring good things to our country.

Valued Guests, Dear Friends,

We made a statement; we said that in the future it will not be states but cities that compete. For this reason, the creation of regional and urban economies, that is, of city economies, is essential. In this way we will have cities that are self-sufficient and that have been able to turn their own assets into value.

The branding of cities and the conversion of their existing assets into value, that is, the proper identification of their potential and the increase of the provinces' value through investments suited to that potential, is an extremely important matter.

On our travels, in which we tour every single point of Türkiye, we obtain a body of data. With this data and with the experience that comes from being in direct contact with you, we created a project, and matching cities became the fundamental starting point of this project.

We gave this work the name “Developing and Branding Cities Through Their Own Unique Values”.

Determining a sound industrialization policy comes about by finding, supporting, scaling up and increasing the capital strength of promising companies that will keep the city economies standing, and, through a domestic and national production drive, both branding the cities and strengthening the companies. We may sum up this system as putting city economies to work in order to carry out industrialization.

We observe that in Iğdır, whose economy rests on agriculture and livestock breeding, the industrial and tourism sectors have not developed sufficiently. In Iğdır, which possesses broad highland pastures, livestock breeding stands out as the most important source of income. Nevertheless, in 2020, when exports declined across the country, Iğdır increased its export volume by %10 compared with the previous year, raising it from USD 71.4 million to USD 78.6 million, and succeeded in producing a foreign trade surplus. When we look at the foreign trade data for the first 6 months of 2021, we see that a marked acceleration has been recorded compared with the previous year. Iğdır, which increased its exports by approximately %24 in January-June compared with the same period of the previous year, has reached the level of USD 44.1 million.

The brand city we have identified for our province of Iğdır, which according to GDP calculations has a size of USD 1.2 billion, is the Swiss city of Lucerne. Lucerne, which has a GDP of USD 23 billion,

  • The most important source of income in the region is agriculture, and most of the land is used for farming. Its most important agricultural and livestock products are fruit growing and cattle breeding.
  • In industry, the focus is on textiles, machinery, timber, tobacco and metallurgical products. as a gateway opening onto holiday resorts, its tourism has also developed
  • If Iğdır's existing potential is used correctly, there is no obstacle whatsoever before its growing in this way. As MÜSİAD, I should also like to state that from today we have begun the duty that falls to us on this matter.
  • With our Smart Agricultural Cities Project, another of our projects, we have launched an initiative to encourage rural development and in this way to support reverse migration and to attain a homogeneous population structure.

With the Smart Agricultural Cities Model, we developed an initiative to encourage rural life and to support rural development, with opportunities targeting the population crowded into the large cities and especially the enterprises of women and young people.

Next week we will share with our members of the press the provinces in which Smart Agricultural Cities are envisaged and our report on agriculture and livestock breeding in the second century of the Republic, after 2023. Our goal is to bring our country to a position where it exports USD 100 billion in food and agriculture in 2030.

Valued Friends,

Finally, I pray to God for mercy upon our brothers and sisters who lost their lives in the disasters that recently occurred at more than one point in our country, offer my condolences to their relatives and wish a swift recovery to our injured. May our Lord grant that these disasters, which burn our hearts, come to an end as soon as possible. As MÜSİAD, from the very first day we have reached the regions damaged by the fires and floods and, through our branches, we are supporting the people of the region. Until these difficult days are behind us, we will always continue to do whatever is within our power.

As I complete my words with these feelings, I wish that the representative office we have opened may be blessed, and I wish success to our representative office president Mr. Ziya Yiğit and to his board of directors. I thank everyone who contributed to this organization, above all our MÜSİAD Local High Board president Mr. Ahmet, our representative office president Mr. Ziya and his board of directors, our professional staff and everyone else, and I greet you with respect and affection.

Abdurrahman KAAN

President of MÜSİAD