Colonial afterlives in the global cocoa supply chain: sharecropping, labour exploitation, and gendered (re)production

This article blends a feminist social reproduction approach with insights from the racial capitalism literature to analyse gendered labour relations in the global cocoa supply chain. It argues that women's exploitation at the base of cocoa supply chains is rooted in sharecropping as a colonial capitalist mode of control over land, labour, and capital, which relies on unequal gendered relations of (re)production. The article historicises patterns of women's labour exploitation in cocoa in relation to the longue durée of colonial capitalist development in Ghana and specifically the shift towards sharecropping after the 1920s. Empirical evidence is drawn from 30 interviews with migrant women working in cocoa production gathered in Ghana in 2021. Based on this analysis, the article suggests that studies of gender within Global Value Chains (GVCs) should pay greater attention to three dynamics: 1) the colonial foundations of production systems and labour relations within agricultural GVCs, namely cocoa; 2) the central role of gendered hierarchies in the constitution of the colonial cocoa industry, as articulated through relations of (re)production; and 3) how gendered labour exploitation is characterised by (colonial capitalist) continuity as well as (neoliberal) change i.e., it is not just reflective of contemporary social and economic 'downgrading'.