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From being a smallholder-based, food-producing country covering its basic needs, Iraq and the Kurdistan Region in Iraq (KRI) have become major importers of food. The sustainability of the agricultural sector has been systematically undermined by conflict, neglect, and mismanagement, as a result of which the capacity of its farmers to feed the population declined. Even though local policymakers, the international community, and the international organisations emphasise the potential of agriculture for food production, job creation, and income generation, they also tend to consider the current food system problematic because of an alleged low productivity that they relate to the existing smallholder system. For them, such system poses a lack of competences and skills of farmers, and a subsistence production orientation. This approach culminated in a policy-making process that offered land and water for capital investments, and thus neglecting the potentials and competencies of (small-scale) farmers. The concomitant neglect of the human dimension of agriculture, namely the family farm, is essentially the continuation of an economically and ecologically high-risk approach that may lead to a further decline of the sector's ability to produce food for the local market.

Based on original data, this article discusses rural-urban mobilities and the contemporary employment-migration relationship. Starting with the observation of reduced rural population but maintained family-farm numbers, it engages with multiple issues, including rural employment, the process of urban migration, settlement in the city, the relation of migrants to the rurality and (return) countermigration. It supports the thesis that migration is not so much about a 'movement from one place to another' , the classical migration definition, and more about a coupling of practices (related to mobilities, residence, employment, etc.) with places over time. Thus, migration and counter-migration are conceptualized as socio-spatial strategies, conceptualized as 'multi-place living' or 'dual life' , which are based on variable engagements with rural farming, urban wage labour and return movements (for retirement, refuge, etc.). The newly emergent and growing dual/multi-place structures that result from this are reshaping village life in particular, expressed in various ways, such as in a changing village demography and function.

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This article focuses on two ways in which smallholders—rural families, the peasantry—are responding to the contemporary neoliberal environment in Turkey by resisting commodification. This resistance, which takes place both by definition, insofar as smallholders refuse to enter, or properly conform to, the logic of capital, and in terms of its characteristics, values and practices of autonomy and sharing, is located in the context of two sites or structures of social commons. These comprise the maintenance of non-commodity circuits, along with the development of what may be identified as a new, dual-circuit articulation, one that involves financial inputs, particularly through engagement in labour relations, in combination with the non-commodity circuits. The latter emerges through manifold, variegated, and informal linkages structured around kin and community and enabled by mobility and migration. Thus, superseding the rural–urban division of space and going beyond capitalistic relations, these comprise a contemporary form of ‘solidarity-network-based social commons’. Presented in this example from Turkey, therefore, are different ways in which smallholder farming operates as a locus of resilience for extended family and village/locality interconnectivity that offers a distance from markets, even as it utilizes them with novel forms of communally oriented autonomies in a more generalized re-spatialization that extends to the urban and goes beyond capital.