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

Abstract

In recent decades, rural livelihood has been restructured dramatically in the Global South as a result of neoliberal transformations such as the removal of state subsidies for small-scale farmers, privatization of agricultural state economic enterprises, rising control of global agribusiness firms on agricultural production, expropriation of rural commons and private farmland for mega-investments in natural resources. Under the Justice and Development Party (AKP) governments, Turkey has been a prime example of these patterns of accumulation and dispossession. Additionally, the country has been facing coal rush policies of the AKP governments with the aim of utilizing domestic coal to overcome the problem of energy supply security. In this paper, I argue that rural change and patterns of proletarianization in the rural extractive regions are inherently gendered and women assume a central role in the production and social reproduction of the classes of extractive labour. Drawing on 3-year research conducted in the Soma Coal Basin, Western Anatolia, Turkey, the paper examines the transformation of 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.