Social reproduction and agrarian change: gendered harms in Bangladesh’s vegetable transition

Bangladeshi farming households are turning to vegetable production to increase their incomes and earn returns at regular intervals. This ‘high risk, high gain’ strategy lacks institutional support relative to Green Revolution legacy rice production. In the western district of Rajshahi, a center of the transition to vegetable cultivation, the challenges of high labor demand and wages are met through the socially devalued un- and underpaid labor of women, who are working regularly in agricultural fields for the first time. This paper examines this gendered subsidy through the lens of the depletion of social reproduction (DSR). DSR is a threshold concept used to identify combinations of bodily, emotional and discursive harm that undermine the sustainability of women’s un- and underpaid labor. We adapt the DSR framework to an analysis of agrarian change by adding the dimension of environmental harm and the compounding factors of risk and uncertainty for this climate-vulnerable and market-volatile activity. We identify principal avenues of DSR in Rajshahi’s vegetable transition that are undermining women’s health and wellbeing. Overall, we argue that DSR offers a useful analytic for understanding combined socioenvironmental harms that shape gendered outcomes and the social limits to smallholder production in contexts of rapid agrarian change.