MÜSİAD, which carries out its work for the all-out development of all regions of Türkiye and which opened its Hakkari Yüksekova representative office last week for this purpose, has most recently held the opening of the MÜSİAD Iğdır representative office and of the new service building of the MÜSİAD Kars representative office.

The MÜSİAD delegation headed by MÜSİAD President Abdurrahman Kaan made a push into the Eastern Anatolian provinces of Iğdır and Kars. MÜSİAD, which opened its Hakkari Yüksekova representative office last week, most recently held the opening of the MÜSİAD Iğdır representative office and of the new service building of the MÜSİAD Kars representative office. The MÜSİAD delegation, which began the Iğdır programme with a visit to Governor Hüseyin Engin Sarıibrahim, also visited Iğdır University Rector Prof. Dr. Mehmet Hakkı Alma and, apart from the visit to Governor Türker Öksüz in the Kars programme, the factories and workplaces of MÜSİAD member businessmen in the region, and examinations were carried out on regional development and on increasing production and employment.

MÜSİAD President Abdurrahman Kaan said at the opening programmes of the MÜSİAD Iğdır Representative Office and of the new service building of the MÜSİAD Kars Representative Office that MÜSİAD is a capital platform that spans Türkiye and the world from end to end, that is the most effective and widespread in the field, that is the pioneer of domestic and national industry in our country, that gives priority to the formation of the national capital stock and indeed builds it.

Kaan, who conveyed that the fact that the strategic goals they designed and voiced 2.5 years ago as MÜSİAD, and the elements they subsequently made concrete one by one with the names of the committees, appear before us in today's world as a series of global goals makes them proud in terms of the breadth of their foresight, their command of strategic reasoning and the scale of the services they will render and are rendering to our state, noted the following:

“Since the day we took office we have always underlined that we are and will be in the service of our state and beside our nation within the framework of the two slogans we determined. The first of these was the motto “TOGETHER”. 
Whatever we do, whatever we produce, whatever we have to withstand, we said together for this country. And we said we are ready to walk together with everyone whose cause is Türkiye. 

Our second motto was “WE ARE HERE”. Likewise, 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 always and in every field our country needs. 

It is an institution that does not forget high morality, virtue, the Akhi culture and helping those in difficulty through such practices as the Goodly Loan and the zimem ledger, not only in the economic field. During the lockdown periods when the pandemic was experienced intensely, it also showed in the field, with its aid, that it stood beside the business world and our low-income people.”

Kaan, who also spoke about the studies prepared by MÜSİAD entitled “Developing Cities Through Their Own Distinctive Values and Branding” and the “Smart Agricultural Cities Model”, conveyed the following about these projects:

“We said that in the future it will not be states but cities that compete, and in order to form regional-urban economies, that is, city economies, we prepared this study, which we named “Developing Cities Through Their Own Distinctive Values and Branding”, in which we matched the cities in our country with other cities in the world that could be their counterparts. The brand city we determined for our province of Iğdır, which according to GDP calculations has a size of USD 1.2 billion, is the Swiss city of Luzern. For Luzern, 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 agriculture. Its most important agricultural and livestock products are fruit 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 to its growing in this way. I would also like to state that as MÜSİAD we have started from today on the task that falls to us in this matter.

With our Smart Agricultural Cities Project, another of our projects, we have launched an initiative to encourage rural development and thereby to support reverse migration and to attain a homogeneous population structure. 

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

This week we will share with our members of the press the provinces where Smart Agricultural Cities are envisaged to be established and our report on agriculture and livestock entitled “Rural Development and the Future of Agriculture in the Second Century of the Republic, 2023 and Beyond”. Our target is to bring our country to a position where it will make USD 100 billion of exports in food and agriculture in 2030.”