Adana
Turkey's cotton capital born from the US Civil War is now its top brain-drain city — farmers switching to citrus while young professionals flee an economy consuming its own foundations.
Adana became Turkey's cotton capital because Abraham Lincoln's navy blockaded the American South. When the US Civil War cut global cotton supply in the 1860s, Cilician farmers in the Cukurova plain began exporting for the first time, building the capital that funded one of Turkey's first industrialised cities. By the early 1900s, factories lined the Seyhan River — almost all of them processing cotton.
That industry is now dying. Farmers across the Cukurova region have been replacing cotton fields with citrus orchards, chasing more stable export income. Turkey's cotton production has fallen to roughly 780,000 metric tonnes on 430,000 hectares, down 9% year over year. The textile mills that depended on local cotton have closed in waves since the mid-1990s, and Adana holds the unwanted distinction of being Turkey's leading brain-drain city — young professionals leaving for Istanbul, Ankara, or abroad.
Adana was born from cotton when the US Civil War cut global supply — and is now dying from cotton as farmers switch to citrus and young professionals flee.
What remains is a city of 1.8 million that still leads Turkey in citrus, watermelon, soybean, grapefruit, and peanut production, with Cukobirlik — the country's largest agricultural cooperative at 36,000 members across ten provinces — managing the transition. The Adana Chamber of Commerce, founded in 1894 specifically to regulate the cotton trade, has evolved to serve 25,000 member companies.
Incirlik Air Base, 10 kilometres east of the city centre, adds a second economic layer. The joint US-Turkish military installation has operated since 1954, supporting NATO operations from the Cold War through Gulf War-era operations and into the present. The base's economic contribution is substantial but creates dependency of a different kind — geopolitical rather than agricultural.
Adana demonstrates autophagy: an organism consuming its own structures to survive a period of resource scarcity. The cotton economy is being digested to fund the transition to citrus and services, but the process is slow and the talent loss may be irreversible. Cities built around a single crop can survive the crop's decline, but only if the replacement economy arrives before the workforce leaves.