A new era for Turkey and the world

"From now on we will have entered a new era, entirely new situations will prevail in our lives, and we are in the excitement of this situation." These are the words President Erdoğan spoke while announcing the great good news that he would give on Friday, right after the opening, last Wednesday in Konya, of Turkey's largest-capacity solar panel factory, a facility that in itself came as very great good news for the country.

The good news that the President said "will open an entirely new era for Turkey" was the 320 billion cubic meter natural gas reserve that the Fatih Seismic Research Vessel, which set out on 29 May, found in its latest drilling in the Black Sea. Far more important than this reserve is that Turkey can now carry out such drilling in the Black Sea with its own means, and that the reserve found is a harbinger of much larger reserves. The meaning for Turkey of such a discovery made in the month of August, remembered for victories, may perhaps appear to be only the size of the reserve found. Yet this discovery has meanings far beyond this.

First of all, it is very important that the national policy move in the field of energy, launched three years ago, has produced such a result at this stage already. Until now Turkey was deprived of the means to identify its own reserves itself and to carry out their exploration and drilling itself. Drilling operations being very expensive, and the possibility that dozens of drillings might yield no result, drilling work obtained through constant procurement of services and the leasing of seismic research and drilling vessels was very difficult and costly to undertake. When no result comes from the research and drilling carried out, it can be both very costly and demoralizing.

Three years ago Turkey made a strategic move to do this work with its own seismic research vessels. In this way, both exploration and drilling costs were greatly reduced and the way was opened to drill as much as desired, with its own vessel, its own engineers and its own technical staff.

This is the really important point. While Turkey ranks among the world's 20 largest economies, it has not achieved this so far by relying on its natural reserves and ready-made resources. On the contrary, Turkey, which because of its energy deficit has to run a trade deficit every year, is a country that set out on the road with a great disadvantage. Yet the only advantage of some countries among the top 20 is oil, gas and natural resources. Because that is so, their economies, though large, in fact have no real strength. Precisely because of this, such economies are going through a very serious contraction due to fluctuations in oil prices. More important than that, because these countries depend entirely on their natural wealth, they hold back as much as they possibly can from efforts to develop themselves in other fields.

Turkey, for its part, as a way of turning this limitation it has had until now in natural resources into an opportunity, turned to investing entirely in human capital. The most important way of developing human capital runs through education and production. In the last 18 years Turkey added 130 more universities to its existing universities, that is, twice as many universities as there were. Whatever anyone says, our universities today show a tremendous performance of diversity and quality. The existing universities are seriously developing Turkey's reserve of human capital. In fact, we are all seeing and living the result together. Set aside the thoroughly pessimistic rhetoric that exhausts everything with certain incidents or anecdotes at individual universities: in terms of overall quality, universities in Turkey make a very serious contribution to the country's development and to its accumulation of human capital.

Turkey did not find ready material resources and develop its human capital on the basis of those resources. On the contrary, it is reaching material gains and development thanks to its human capital. The evident resilience of Turkey's economy at present, while the economies of the whole world are in serious contraction, rests on this infrastructure.

In education, health, transportation, agricultural and industrial production, and especially in the defense industry, Turkey's difference stands out more with each passing day. The story of all this difference leads back to the same point: human capital.

That oil-rich countries have not developed this human capital may perhaps be because oil has made them lazy. Though God knows what state these countries would be in had they not had their oil. It is a subject worth thinking about and making sociological analyses of. But it must also not be forgotten that the policies of shaking off, over the last 18 years, have made a very important contribution to this deprivation in Turkey having been turned into an advantage rather than a disadvantage for Turkey.

Now we have gas too. That we found this gas after having carried our human capital quality to a certain point is a separate bounty from God. Of course this discovery will not make us complacent from now on. We still have much work to do.