The feminist political economy of agricultural mechanization: tea harvesting machines and women's work in turkey's black sea region

Abstract

Tea harvesting in Rize, located in Turkey's Black Sea region, where around 65% of the country's tea is produced, offers an important vantage point for understanding how mechanisation unfolds in feminised smallholder agriculture. Despite widespread promotion of agricultural machinery as a labour-saving solution, little is known about its gendered consequences in contexts where production depends heavily on unpaid family labour. This article examines the recent introduction of tea-harvesting machines in smallholder farms in Rize, drawing on extensive fieldwork to analyse how mechanisation reshapes women's work and intra-household power relations. In this setting, the adoption of harvesting machines emerged primarily as a pragmatic household response to labour scarcity and mounting pressures of social reproduction, rather than as a strategy of commercial modernisation. The analysis highlights two key gendered consequences of mechanisation. First, mechanisation reorganises rather than reduces women's labour, devaluing women's embodied knowledge and practices while rendering their contributions less visible within measures of productivity. Second, mechanisation diminishes women's embodied authority over selective harvesting, as machine-based cutting sidelines the sensory judgement and care-based practices that previously anchored their expertise. Finally, the adoption of machines emerged not as a step toward commercial modernisation but as a household response to labour scarcity and a deepening crisis of social reproduction. By integrating feminist technology studies with Marxist feminist agrarian political economy, the article demonstrates that mechanisation in Rize is a gendered socio-technical process that reconfigures labour, skill, and authority within petty commodity production. This challenges assumptions of neutral, labour-saving technological progress and highlights the need to situate agricultural innovation within the intertwined dynamics of gender, ecology, and social reproduction.