This story was produced by our colleagues at the BBC.
The Mirbey flour mill in Turkey is once again a hive of activity — but it’s been on a long road to get here.
“We went through very difficult things under very challenging conditions,” said Ali Emiroğl, who founded this business nearly a quarter-century ago.
The company has gone through tough times — including persistently high inflation and currency crises. But nothing prepared him for Feb. 6, 2023, when earthquakes hit Turkey and Syria. The toll was astounding — an estimated 55,000 people were killed. The economic costs of the disaster total about $84 billion.
“The machines inside the factory shifted from their places. The engines were seriously damaged,” Emiroğl said. “The Ministry of Industry came to do an inspection, and their assessment showed almost $2 million of damage to the factory.”
That included a collapsed roof, raw materials that were ruined by relentless rain and the theft of products in the immediate aftermath of the quakes.
For more than two months, Emiroğl lived at the factory. Many of his workers, including Süleyman Bilir, came back to help with repairs to get production back online as quickly as possible.
“We carried out significant renovations together with Ali, working shoulder to shoulder, day and night,” he said. “Ali took care of our children, our home and our money in the best possible way. Our children did not go hungry.”
To help with the repairs, Emiroğl discovered a loan program for businesses in Turkey’s 11 earthquake-affected provinces. The U.S. government’s International Development Finance Corp. provided a seven-year, $100 million loan to Turkey’s Sekerbank to support small- and medium-size businesses in the region. Sekerbank added its own contribution, increasing the available funds to $133 million.
“In the next three years, five years, there will definitely be more need,” said Murat Özdama, Şekerbank’s regional manager for Antakya. “This is a very limited budget, but we will provide more. We are already trying to provide it as quickly as possible.”
Mirbey’s Emiroğl said the U.S.-Sekerbank loan has been hugely helpful. Not only has he been able to repair his roof, he explained that his mill is one of the only mills to restart production among about a dozen in the area.
“We need to expand more to encourage our people to return to Hatay,” he added. “We need to increase the capacity in the next five years to meet the growing demands.”
Emiroğl said he is slowly expanding his business by using parts of the wheat crop discarded for flour production to make livestock feed. That, he said, not only ensures he’ll be able to stay in business, but that his neighbors will be able to thrive again too.
