The easiest place for hazelnuts to go upon leaving Turkey is pretty much Italy, especially without paying for the Suez Canal
-My understanding is that China loves in shell hazelnuts, basically like a traditional thing over there, possibly being related to new year celebrations.
-We have multiple varieties of hazelnuts that each have their advantages and disadvantages. We have a lot that work well for direct eating. It’s more difficult to get exactly what you need from Turkey, since their focus seems mostly about fat content, rather than taste/color/size/texture/shelf-life.
-American reputation for safe and sanity food. Our farms are more sanity (as much as any farm can ever be), less contaminated with pollution and pesticide residues, and we have much more capable cleaning infrastructure where nuts are washed/sanitized(a “kill step”)/dried.
-We control the moths and bacterial blight which results in low amounts of infested nuts going out. If you’ve ever eaten in shell pistachios, you’ll know that occasionally you’ll get a dried worm or shriveled/moldy black nut. Can’t really eliminate it yet, but we keep it at an “acceptable” level.
-We are better at keeping the nuts climate controlled, so they don’t go rancid.
-Geographically we are well positioned, able to send them to the ports within state, and across the pacific.
-When prices are reasonable, the demand in China is big enough that they could completely absorb our output even if we doubled it and sent it all to China. Last I checked we produce about 4-5% of the world output. Turkey is like 75%.
So I can definitely see a similar sort of “free trade agreement” occurring between China and Russia as there’s very little incentive for either to care to monitor all the busy businessmen, so long as the right palms get greased.