Abstract
As part of the neoliberal restructuring that started in 1980s in Turkey, Turkish agriculture has gone through a significant transformation process in 2000s. Increasing imports following the liberalization of foreign trade negatively affected the agricultural self-sufficiency of the country. State economic enterprises in the markets of crucial crops were privatized, and agricultural sales cooperatives and their unions were restructured. The place of the agricultural sector in national economy deteriorated, and this was accompanied by a decline in the rural population, in parallel to the shrinking agricultural production and accelerating migration. This ended in multi-layered commodification -of the land, crops, and labour power of the peasantry.
The gendered impact of this transformation is largely unclear. The fact that the state supports provided for agricultural development cooperatives, in its new form, included the attempt for increasing participation of women to the economy underlines the need for a gendered lens to account for the macro-level transformation in the agricultural sector. Therefore, this study focuses on one of the women’s agricultural development cooperatives in Turkey (Kınalı Eller Cooperative in Beypazarı, Ankara) to find out the dynamics of changing micro-level and macro-level relations. Women appear as active economic actors, beyond being passive recipients of the neoliberal restructuring, thereby shaping this restructuring process as well.
The study is based on a fieldwork that includes in-depth interviews with producers of this cooperative -women- and with consumers of the products -also women-, in addition to the research on the last two decades of the sector. The cooperative acts like a bridge between rural and urban life, as all the inputs depend on local sources and the final products take place on the shelves of markets. Looking at both sides enables us to understand not only the differences and inequalities, but also the newly emerging connection and solidarity among women. The experiences of women in this process leads us to a better grasp of the interrelation between crude dichotomies of public-private and rural-urban spheres or paid-unpaid work. It is argued that, while penetrating to the countryside, capitalism also creates its own challenge. Because the emphasis on individual entrepreneurship in the new form of cooperatives clashes with the re-operationalization of collective knowledge in the production process, on the one hand, and marketization of traditional products of rural women also means collectivization of unpaid labour of both rural and urban women, on the other.
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