Description
Global agricultural sectors have historically relied on forced labour, bodily degradation and dispossession of racialised groups of workers, including enslaved African people, migrant workers and people in the Global South. This paper asks: what role do race and empire play in shaping workers' experience of labour in contemporary agricultural supply chains? Contributing to and synthesising critical literature on supply chains and racialisation - the process through which people are coded as belonging to a racial group - within IPE, this paper proposes the concept of 'chains of race' to conceptualise the co-development and co-constitution of agricultural supply chains and the racial categorisation of agricultural workers. This concept is applied to two industry case studies - the US tomato and Costa Rican banana plantation industries - drawing on and historicising primary data collected in 2022. The paper traces how business and state actors historically constructed workforces by mobilising racial categories to ‘justify’ severely bodily degradation and exploitation, with significant implications for contemporary practices of exploitation and repression in agricultural sectors. However, the paper also shows how vocabularies of race and empire can provide fertile ground for resistance, with workers organising across racialised divides between workers themselves, and between workers and consumers to resist powerful agri-business models that engender severe exploitation. Historical and contemporary manifestations of race and empire therefore significantly shape both labour control and labour agency, the interface of which produces workers’ experience in agricultural supply chains.
