Commodity chains, disarticulation, and agricultural materiality

Over the past several decades, the organization of global food systems has been transformed by the consolidation of neoliberal policy frameworks, the liberalization of agricultural trade, and the ascendancy of global value chains (GVCs) as a dominant mode of economic coordination. These shifts have reconfigured the spatial and institutional architectures of agri-food production through discontinuous and partial processes of industrialization, giving rise to fragmented and uneven patterns of capitalist development. Agricultural restructuring has never been uniform; rather, it has occurred through local histories, cultural meanings, labor relations, and ecological processes that mediate how global imperatives are realized in practice.

In contexts such as Turkey, where agriculture was historically coordinated through state-led planning and protectionist regimes, the retreat of centralized agricultural policies and rural development programs has created a new institutional terrain. As comprehensive state coordination has weakened, regulation and accumulation have increasingly taken shape through commodity-specific frameworks, including crop-based subsidies, certification schemes, and geographically bounded incentive programs. The result is a differentiated agricultural landscape in which producers are incorporated into global circuits of capital in highly uneven ways. The notion of a coherent “national agricultural sector” consequently becomes less analytically useful, as governance is increasingly articulated through fragmented, product-oriented arrangements.

To make sense of these transformations, this special issue approaches commodity chains as socially and historically embedded structures in which flows of materials are inseparable from the relations of power, labor, knowledge, and governance that shape – and are shaped by – them. Rather than viewing GVCs as linear sequences of transactions, our analytical framework begins with the disarticulation approach (Bair and Werner Reference Bair and Werner2011), which emphasizes the uneven and selective ways in which people, places, and products are linked to or excluded from commodity chains. This perspective moves beyond the economistic assumptions of mainstream commodity chain analysis and foregrounds the fragmented geographies and contested politics of agri-food restructuring.

The concept of embeddedness, frequently invoked in the literature on alternative agri-food networks (Murdoch Reference Murdoch2000; Sonnino Reference Sonnino2007), has been instrumental in drawing attention to the sociocultural and ecological dimensions of food production. However, as Moragues-Faus and Sonnino (Reference Moragues-Faus and Sonnino2012) point out, a normative opposition between embedded “local-good” and disembedded “global-bad” food systems risks obscuring the complex institutional configurations and power relations that underpin the production, circulation, and regulation of food. By contrast, the disarticulation approach illuminates the selective and fragmented ways in which people, territories, and crops are connected to – or disconnected from – global circuits. It directs analytical attention to the uneven geographies of power, dependency, and resistance that emerge when agricultural production is reorganized around specific commodities.

This issue also takes up Talbot’s (Reference Talbot and Bair2009) call for greater methodological rigor in chain analysis, particularly through the careful delineation of units of analysis and typologies of governance. By disaggregating commodity chains into their constituent segments – on-farm production, processing, marketing, distribution, and consumption – we are better equipped to identify the loci of power, modalities of coordination, and dynamics of value capture at each juncture. Governance in agri-food chains is rarely unitary; rather, it is characterized by hybrid and overlapping structures involving states, transnational corporations, non-governmental organizations, certification bodies, and producer organizations. While Gereffi’s (Reference Gereffi, Gereffi and Korzeniewicz1994) classical distinction between buyer-driven and producer-driven chains remains analytically useful, Gereffi et al’s (Reference Gereffi, Humphrey and Sturgeon2005) work on network governance provides a richer framework for analyzing complex interactions among diverse actors. Yet we are also committed to articulate such institutional analyses with the biological and ecological characteristics of agricultural production that further complicate governance and value creation.

The agro-exceptionalist perspective (Guthman Reference Guthman and Bair2009) recognizes the centrality of nature, as both constraint and enabling agent, in shaping the organization of food systems. Seasonality, perishability, land-based cultivation practices, and the metabolic properties of food all place limits on standardization and industrialization, while simultaneously creating opportunities for rent generation, alternative food networks, and place-based labels or territorial branding. Agricultural materiality is not a passive backdrop to social processes but an active force in their constitution. As Goodman (Reference Goodman2001) argued, ontology matters. Drawing on actor–network theory and feminist STS, scholars such as Paxson (Reference Paxson2008), Faier (Reference Faier2011), and Lien (Reference Lien2015) have demonstrated that food production involves the lively agencies of microbes, animals, plants, and technologies that co-produce the qualities and identities of food. More recent agri-food technoscience scholarship, including work associated with the Science and Technology Studies Food and Agriculture Network (STSFAN), further examines how knowledge, materiality, and governance intersect in the making of contested food futures (Burch et al. Reference Burch, Gugganig, Guthman, Reisman, Comi, Brock, Kagliwal, Freidberg, Baur, Heimstädt, Sippel, Speakman, Marquis, Argüelles, Biltekoff, Broad, Bronson, Faxon, Frohlich, Ghosh, Halfon, Legun and Martin2023). Research on crop biodiversity and monocultures likewise shows how plant varieties, scientific classifications, regulatory devices, and multispecies relations enter directly into capitalist accumulation and agrarian politics (Hartigan Reference Hartigan2017; Hetherington Reference Hetherington2020). The result is a relational ontology of agriculture that recognizes the co-constitution of human and nonhuman actors in the making of value, quality, and taste.

This theoretical synthesis combining political economy, political ecology, and STS forms the analytical backbone of this special issue. It allows us to investigate agricultural commodities not only as objects of trade but also as sites of negotiation where material, technical, ecological, and cultural practices intersect. Each commodity has its own ecology of production, constellation of actors, and mode of governance, making it an entry point for studying the multiplicity and fragmentation of contemporary capitalism.

Uneven agrarian transformations: contributions to the special issue

As global agro-industrial logics increasingly permeate Turkey’s rural landscapes through retail consolidation, contract farming, and technocratic certification regimes, local actors are compelled to align with new demands, renegotiate their practices, or risk marginalization and withdrawal from agrarian livelihoods. At the same time, a growing array of countermovements has sought to re-embed food systems in alternative spaces and forms of value creation, social trust, solidarity, and collective action. Cooperative experiments, local food activism, municipal procurement programs, seed-exchange networks, alternative certification schemes, and community-supported agriculture groups reveal that disarticulation is not only a process of exclusion but also a potential source of reconfiguration. As actors withdraw or are displaced from dominant circuits, they may forge new forms of collective action and alternative systems of value.

These transformations play out differently across commodities. In the dairy sector, standardized hygiene regulations and quality certification systems have favored large industrial producers, often at the expense of small-scale and artisanal cheesemakers. Traditional producers whose practices are embedded in specific ecologies and social relations have had to adapt to technocratic regimes or seek alternative market niches through geographical indications and Slow Food Presidia. In the horticultural sector, crops such as avocados and sweet cherries have emerged as symbols of upward mobility and export success, yet their expansion raises questions about ecological sustainability, water use, labor conditions, and smallholder autonomy. In hazelnut production, Turkey’s strong position in global markets rests on persistent inequalities affecting both growers and seasonal migrant workers. In fisheries and aquaculture, rapid industrial growth has generated environmental degradation and conflict over marine resources, exposing tensions between capitalist expansion and ecological limits across national borders.

Taken together, these cases show how market integration, state regulation, and ecological conditions interact to shape the everyday practices of agricultural actors. They also demonstrate that market integration and disarticulation are neither singular events nor opposite endpoints. Rather, they are recursive processes through which products, places, and people may be incorporated into one chain while being marginalized within another, and through which new forms of dependence can coexist with agency, collective organization, and alternative valuation. Turkey’s agrarian transformations are therefore best understood not as a single, coherent trajectory but as uneven and fragmented patterns of capitalist development across regions and commodities. These patterns emerge through heterogeneous and contested processes of production and accumulation, in which global and local forces continually reshape one another through the articulation, disarticulation, and re-articulation of commodity chains.

The five research articles develop this argument through distinct product-specific lenses. Nil Alt’s “Cultivating consent: frontier-making and the politics of smallholder subordination in western Turkey’s sweet cherry frontier” traces the disarticulation of villages in Şehzadeler, Manisa, from tobacco commodity chains and their subsequent re-articulation with global sweet cherry networks. By examining how a vertically integrated company coordinates fragmented smallholders through contingent forms of contract farming, Alt shows that the making of an export-oriented commodity frontier depends not only on economic incorporation but also on cultural and political practices that cultivate consent while turning smallholders into de facto laborers on their own land.

In “Domesticating a superfood: research, extension, and farmer agency in Turkey’s avocado boom,” Baran Karsak challenges accounts that attribute emerging superfood geographies primarily to global demand. Tracing a century of public agricultural research and extension in southern Turkey, he demonstrates how state institutions created the material conditions for avocado cultivation, while extension agents promoted risk-taking and export-oriented practices. Farmers nevertheless continue to favor locally popular, cold-hardy cultivars and the domestic market, revealing both their agency and a persistent disjuncture between the state’s export vision and producers’ ecological and economic realities.

Pinar Ertör-Akyazi, Irmak Ertör, and İrem Çifçi’s “Big fish eat little fish: expanding commodity frontiers of farmed sea bass and sea bream in Turkey and West Africa” follows the transnational chain assembled by Turkey’s vertically integrated aquaculture firms: from fish-feed production based on small pelagic fish caught in West African waters to sea bass and sea bream cultivation in Turkey and distribution in European markets. Their analysis shows how state subsidies, certification, geopolitical expansion, low labor costs, and the appropriation of “cheap nature” have enabled the industry’s rapid growth while displacing its socioecological costs onto coastal communities and marine ecologies in Turkey and West Africa.

In “Articulation and disarticulation of Kars cheeses within dairy commodity chains,” M. Fatih Tatari and Derya Nizam reconstruct the historical trajectories of Kars Kaşarı and Boğatepe Gravyeri and examine their recent re-articulation through geographical indication and Slow Food labels. They conceptualize re-articulation not as a simple reversal of exclusion but as a transformative socioecological process grounded in collective action and in negotiations between tradition and standardization, and between solidarity and market rationalization. The material properties of the cheeses, pastures, and artisanal tools are integral to these negotiations and to the new conventions of quality through which Kars’s historical disadvantages have been reconfigured and its cheeses have re-entered national markets.

The article by Deniz Yükseker, H. Deniz Sert, Osman Şahin, and Hüseyin Yener Erköse examines Turkey’s position in the global hazelnut value chain through the intertwined experiences of growers and seasonal migrant workers in three Black Sea provinces. It argues that neither Turkey’s deep integration into global confectionery chains nor company-led social responsibility programs have produced meaningful economic or social upgrading: farmers remain exposed to low productivity, climatic vulnerability, and the power of intermediaries and multinational buyers, while hazelnut cultivation is sustained by institutional arrangements that reproduce migrant workers’ cheap and precarious labor. The case thus reveals labor exploitation not as a secondary consequence of an otherwise successful export chain but as one of its constitutive conditions.

The issue’s interview and review essay extend the product-specific approach beyond the five articles. In “Tea, ethnography, and social change: a conversation with Chris Hann,” Zafer Yenal revisits Hann’s Tea and the Domestication of the Turkish State (1990), an influential single-commodity study of state formation, rural modernization, and everyday life in Rize. The conversation reflects on changing state–society relations, political and religious transformations, regional differentiation, and the continuing analytical value – and limits – of using one commodity to illuminate broader sociopolitical change.

Finally, Canan Uçar Özkul’s review essay, “Rethinking critical agrarian studies on Turkey through a more-than-human lens,” brings four recent books – Caterina Scaramelli’s How to Make a Wetland, Erdem Evren’s Bulldozer Capitalism, Zozan Pehlivan’s The Political Ecology of Violence, and Duygu Kaşdoğan, Ekin Kurtiç, and Mehmet Ekinci’s edited collection Material Politics in Turkey – into conversation with critical agrarian studies. Organized around materiality, infrastructure, scientific knowledge, and violence, the essay asks how more-than-human approaches can reformulate agrarian questions rather than merely add nonhuman actors to established analyses.