Rethinking agriculture through product-specific commodity chains

The global agri-food landscape is undergoing a profound and uneven transformation.The converging crises of recent yearsfrom the COVID-19 pandemic to the wars in Ukraine and Gaza, and from rising protectionism to escalating climate shockshave laid bare the vulnerabilities of the hyperglobalization era.Disruptions in production and logistics, amplified by extreme weather events, have exposed the fragility of food supply systems across the world.At the same time, the post-2016 resurgence of protectionist politics, exemplified by the Trump administration's trade wars and a broader turn toward economic nationalism, has accelerated the fragmentation of global markets.Concepts such as "decoupling" and "friend-shoring" have entered the mainstream vocabulary of global capitalism, marking a new phase in which states and corporations seek to reconfigure supply chains along political, regional, and security lines.Agriculture and food, though often sidelined in these debates, are central to this reconfiguration: as sources of livelihood, instruments of sovereignty, and terrains of ecological and political contestation.Recent supply crises and rapidly rising food prices have underscored the extent to which food systems are entangled with broader economic and geopolitical shifts.The growing frequency of cold snaps, heavy rainfall and sudden floods, unseasonal frosts, and prolonged droughts further demonstrates how environmental volatility and global market uncertainty now converge in shaping agricultural production.This special issue situates these global shifts within Turkey's changing agrarian landscape.We take a product-specific commodity chain perspective as our analytical entry point, examining how particular commoditiescheese, avocado, hazelnuts, sweet cherries, and farmed fishmediate the intersections of local ecologies, historical transformations, labor relations, and global markets.Our wager is that a single-commodity focus enables a finer-grained understanding of agrarian change, foregrounding how value, expertise, and power are organized through the material and social specificities of products themselves.By tracing the trajectories of distinct commodities, we illuminate how processes of inclusion and exclusion, and empowerment and dispossession are enacted in contemporary food systems.