Tomato land : women's labour in food production and processing in Turkey.

This thesis is about the place of gender roles and relations in global food production, based on an extensive ethnography of tomato production and processing in Turkey. Broadly, it looks at how attempts to integrate Turkish agriculture and food industries into the global economy have affected rural populations including women and men, but particularly the transformative consequences for women’s labour. The main question guiding the research is to ask how constructions of, and the availability of, women’s labour shapes and is shaped by the interaction between the global economy and local dynamics. In order to answer this question, I chose to engage with tomato production and processing because tomatoes have the highest export rate of all fresh and processed fruit and vegetables in Turkey. My participant-observation followed the path taken by tomatoes produced in Western Turkey for one of the biggest Japanese tomato processing brands. This included my work on the tomato fields for all of the spring planting and the summer harvest in 2013 and in a tomato-processing factory in late summer and autumn 2014. The research also drew on in-depth interviews with different social actors in the global tomato production chain in Turkey, including members of landowning families and the factory manager. I completed my fieldwork by travelling to South-eastern Anatolia (March, 2014) and staying in the homes of the Kurdish seasonal migrant workers, with whom I worked on the land in Western Turkey (in 2013). In looking at the transformation of rural women’s labour in Turkey, my sociological focus comprised the gendered division of labour in factory, field and domestic work; different forms of patriarchy; the intersection of inequalities, including those of gender, ethnicity, class and age; forms of workers’ consent and resistance, as well as the interwoven nature of the relations of production and reproduction. Focusing on these aspects of women’s lives has reshaped this research; it began as a study of women’s labour and turned into research about gender in global food production, although women’s experiences are still at its heart. My thesis is that these processes can be best understood by applying the term ‘intersectional patriarchy’ and its material manifestation 'el âlem'. The ultimate goal and contribution of my research is to integrate women’s reproductive work into global commodity chain analysis and contribute to labour process theory with the help of these ‘locally’ developed terms