Social reproduction shaping global markets: Women’s labor transforming the palm oil industry

Abstract

How do gendered practices of social reproduction shape the organization of global agricultural markets? This research examines how firms in the Colombian palm oil industry leverage deeply rooted gender inequalities to capture larger shares of value, ultimately transforming the structure of the entire value chain and producing new forms of labor fragmentation across gender. Social reproduction theory calls for greater attention to how unpaid reproductive work makes lucrative economic activities possible. Today, unpaid activities of social reproduction constitute key conditions of possibility for agrarian extractivism and global economic markets (Mezzadri, Newman, and Stevano 2021; Ojeda 2021). For instance, while women have been systematically excluded from employment in palm oil plantations, they often undertake key unpaid activities of work and care that make men’s labor in these plantations possible and maximize value for palm oil corporations. (Berman-Arévalo and Ojeda 2020). Building on this work, this paper examines how palm oil corporations have restructured their value chain to capture value from unpaid women’s work. Specifically, palm oil corporations have profited from the gendered division of production and social reproduction practices by (1) introducing flexible labor arrangements, (2) expanding contract farming, and (3) dissolving pre-existing workplace care amenities. Through these organizational transformations, corporations have profited from gendered practices of care, which subsidize the production of oil palm fruit. These transformations have also shaped global markets as lead firms outsource oil palm fruit production to distance themselves from gendered labor exploitation, while marketing their products as sustainable. Through twelve months of ethnographic research in different spaces along the palm oil value chain and mapping key historical transformations in the Colombian industry, this research offers a situated and historically informed view of gendered labor fragmentation through the role of social reproduction in the structure of global markets.

References

Berman-Arévalo, Eloísa, and Diana Ojeda. 2020. “Ordinary Geographies: Care, Violence, and Agrarian Extractivism in ‘Post-Conflict’ Colombia.” Antipode 52 (6): 1583–1602.

Mezzadri, Alessandra, Susan Newman, and Sara Stevano. 2021. “Feminist Global Political Economies of Work and Social Reproduction.” Review of International Political Economy 0 (0): 1–21.

Ojeda, Diana. 2021. “Social Reproduction, Dispossession and the Gendered Workings of Agrarian Extractivism in Colombia.” In Agrarian Extractivism in Latin America, edited by Ben M. McKay, Alberto Alonso-Fradejas, and Arturo Ezquerro-Cañete. New York: Routledge.