Description
This paper brings together a social reproduction lens with insights from the literature on racial capitalism to understand gendered labour relations in the global cocoa supply chain, using a case study of Ghana. The paper demonstrates that women’s exploitation at the base of cocoa supply chains is not only rooted in patriarchal customary practices and norms, but in sharecropping as a specific mode of control over land and capital that relies on women’s unpaid (re)productive labour. The paper historicises contemporary patterns of gendered labour exploitation in relation to the longue durée of colonial capitalism in Ghana and specifically the shift towards sharecropping arrangements in what was then the “Gold Coast” from the 1920s onward. On the basis of this analysis, the paper argues that existing studies of gender within Global Value Chains (GVCs) pay insufficient attention to three key dynamics: the colonial foundations of labour regimes, modes of production, and commercial dynamics within agricultural GVCs; the historical interrelationship of gendered and racialised hierarchies as these are constituted through relations of (re)production; and how exploitative labour relations at the base of agri-food GVCs are characterised by continuity as well as change i.e. they are not just reflective of social and economic “downgrading” under neoliberalism. Empirically, the paper draws on data gathered as part of a multi-sector study of gender, migration and labour exploitation in Ghana in 2020-2021, which comprised 30 interviews with migrant women working in cocoa production across five cocoa-growing communities.
