Rising Authoritarian Neoliberalism in Rural Turkey: Change and Negotiation of Women in a Gendered Agribusiness in Western Anatolia

The social reproduction of natural resource extraction and gendered labour regimes in rural Turkey

“…According to the statement of the Union of Agricultural Chambers (UAC, 2021), the estimated rate of women (paid and unpaid) agricultural workers who are not included in the social security system is 94.5%. 3 Therefore, women's agricultural work in Turkey is invisible in both paid and unpaid forms (Çelik, 2021b;Eren, 2019), and to make it visible, it is essential to support quantitative data with qualitative research and the narratives of rural women.…”

“…Under the Justice and Development Party (AKP) governments, Turkey has been a prime example of these patterns of accumulation and dispossession. The neoliberal agricultural policies, which resulted in the impoverishment, dispossession and proletarianization of the small-scale farmers, have been accompanied by a renewed interest in mega-investments in natural resource industries (Adaman & Akbulut, 2021;Eren, 2022;Erensü, 2018). These investments, on the one hand, led to further dispossession of small-scale farmers because of the expropriation 1 Barrios de Chungara and Viezzer (1978) women's (i) petty commodity production as unpaid family farmers, (ii) agricultural wage work and (iii) reproductive work as miners' wives and subsistence farmers as a result of rising private sector coal investments since the mid-2000s.…”