Your land, my labour: rethinking sharecropping in Türkiye’s tea production

This article examines the persistence and transformation of sharecropping in Türkiye’s tea-producing Eastern Black Sea region. Drawing on ethnographic fieldwork conducted in Rize, Artvin and Ordu between January and July 2024, the study explores how sharecropping functions as a flexible and evolving labour arrangement amid agrarian restructuring. Contrary to the assumption that sharecropping would disappear under capitalist agriculture, the findings reveal its dynamic adaptation to new labour conditions and rural migration patterns. Sharecropping represents a livelihood strategy shaped by landlessness, precarious employment and inter-regional mobility. The article also highlights the gendered structure of sharecropping, emphasising the central role of women’s unpaid labour in sustaining production. Rather than being a feudal remnant, sharecropping emerges as a restructured and socially differentiated form of labour embedded in contemporary capitalist agriculture.