On an early morning in December, Neslihan Yıldırım washed fresh bunches of arugula, one after the other.
As a farmer, she followed the usual routine, rinsing her greens and sorting them into bags for sale at a nearby market. But after the Feb. 6 earthquake, she can no longer tell if her products are actually clean.
“This year, cress was not growing much in the areas where there was a lot of asbestos. It grew poorly,” said Yıldırım, who also grows peppers, herbs and other seasonal vegetables.
“Normally, this is a winter-loving plant,” she told Turkey recap, referring to cress. “The current weather is both cold and sunny, but the plant is constantly shrinking. After growing to a certain point, it starts to dissolve into the soil again. We couldn’t understand why this was happening.”
No research or tests have been conducted on her crops, so Yıldırım can only guess the cause of the odd growth cycle, though she thinks the nearby asbestos mound might be part of the reason.
About 100 meters from her field, rubble from collapsed buildings had been dumped for months. The mound remained an open dump site, often blowing dust onto Yıldırım’s lot, before it was recently covered with large sheets of fabric.
“We were exposed to a lot of dust. We were unable to clean [the crops], because as soon as we cleaned everything, it started to get dirty again,” Yıldırım said.
She started crying while talking about how hard it was to earn enough income and care for her two young children and elderly mother. All of them lived together in a container next to their damaged house.
Yıldırım’s daily struggles are just one example of the problems faced by farmers in post-quake Hatay. Uncertainty about the health and environmental risks caused by toxic dust and affected water supplies, coupled with lower quality harvests and reduced sales due to the mass population displacement affect many of the remaining farmers in the region.
Reported together with Burcu Özkaya Günaydın for Turkey recap