Trapped Under the Orient's Night: Blind-Sourced Child Labour in Contract Tobacco Farming

This paper examines the organisation of child labour under contract farming in Oriental tobacco production in Türkiye's Aegean region. Drawing on long-term fieldwork between July 2022 and July 2025, it argues that the post-2000 transition from state procurement to buyer-driven contracting restructured not only market coordination but also household labour regimes. Taking the household as a differentiated site of gendered and generational labour mobilisation, it demonstrates how contractual obligations are internalised within households and translated into intensified family labour, including children's night-time harvesting work. Under the current contracting scheme, children are effectively blind-sourced into labour within family-based work arrangements: Their work is neither directly contracted nor recognised, yet it is embedded in the execution of contractual demands. In doing so, the paper shows how contracts formalise the incorporation of kinship-based domestic economies into buyer-driven sourcing arrangements, shifting risk and labour costs onto households while obscuring children's labour structurally within supply chain governance and contemporary regimes of contractual accountability.