Seasons of Hunger: Fighting Cycles of Starvation Among the World's Rural Poor
184
Seasons of Hunger: Fighting Cycles of Starvation Among the World's Rural Poor
184Paperback
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Overview
Seasonal hunger is caused by annual cycles of shrinking food stocks, rising prices, and lack of income. This hidden hunger pushes millions of children to the brink of starvation every year, permanently stunting their physical and cognitive development, weakening their immune systems and opening the door for killer diseases. Action Against Hunger argue that ending seasonal hunger could save millions of young lives and is key to achieving the Millennium Development Goals. This book documents seasonal hunger in four countries - India, Malawi, Mali and Myanmar - including personal stories and country-wide data which shows the magnitude of the problem.
The authors also find encouraging examples of interventions designed to address seasonality - initiatives led by governments, donors and NGOs, and poor people themselves - and propose a package of advocacy messages that could contribute to the global eradication of seasonal hunger. This book will be a valuable resource for journalists, policy makers, NGO members and students of development studies.
Product Details
| ISBN-13: | 9780745328263 |
|---|---|
| Publisher: | Pluto Press |
| Publication date: | 11/20/2008 |
| Pages: | 184 |
| Product dimensions: | 5.00(w) x 7.70(h) x 0.40(d) |
About the Author
Bapu Vaitla is an advocacy and research officer for Action Against Hunger.
Samuel Hauenstein Swan heads Hunger Watch, Action Against Hunger's research and advocacy department.Publications include: Women and Hunger, The Justice of Eating (co-edited), Local Voices and HIV and Hunger.
Read an Excerpt
CHAPTER 1
Those with Cold Hands
The poor? They are those who have cold hands ... (from discussion with community members in Geni village, Mchinji district, Malawi)
Devison Banda walks slowly up the red clay path, hoe hanging loosely from his fingers, sweat dripping down his face. He does not look surprised to see us, three researchers from the city with note pads and pencils in hand, sitting on a log near his house; perhaps a neighbour informed him of our arrival. He smiles greetings as we rise to shake hands.
It is a hot afternoon in the village of Kasiya in central Malawi, the fifth consecutive clear day in the midst of the rainy season – beautiful weather if you are a field researcher, dangerous weather if you are a farmer. Another week without rain and the fields of maize around us will begin to wilt. Devison suggests that his uncle's shed, a small, sturdy structure of brick and mortar, would be a comfortable place to sit and talk. His uncle is the village headman, and one of the few people in the community who could afford to build such a shed. Most of the surrounding houses, including Devison's own, are built of wood and thatch.
We chat with Devison at length, trying to learn more about the lives of the people in the village. He tells us that this past year was not catastrophic, certainly not like the terrible year of 2002, when nine people in Kasiya died of hunger. But the food supplies from last year's harvest are dwindling, and the upcoming harvest is not looking promising. 'I didn't have enough money to buy fertiliser for my maize field this year,' Devison says, 'so it won't yield much.' He looks out of the shed's doorway at the clear sky and shakes his head. 'And the rain ... it's hard to say what will happen.'
We ask Devison to tell us about his daily routine at this time of the growing season, in mid-February with the harvest still two months away. 'My wife and I wake up at about five o'clock in the morning,' he begins, 'and head out right away to the fields, before it gets too hot. We try to do most of the farm work – which this time of year is mostly weeding and banking soil around the bases of the plants – before one o'clock in the afternoon, when it's time to eat the first meal.'
The three of us researchers look at each other, and then at our watches. Almost two o'clock; our conversation has delayed his first meal even longer. 'So,' our colleague Smart Massamba says to Devison, 'you haven't eaten yet today.' Devison shakes his head. 'These days, we have only two meals a day – no breakfast. It's the hunger season.'
And the two meals are, in both quality and quantity, far from what the word 'meal' might suggest. The largest meal is dinner, when the family eats nsima, a starchy maize product that tastes somewhat like a thick porridge. Boiled pumpkin leaves and whatever few vegetables are available are used to make a sauce; meat is almost never eaten during the hunger months. Lunch is maize porridge, essentially a thinner version of nsima. Between December and March, this is the daily menu for Devison's family.
Fundamentally, the causes of this seasonal hunger have to do with rainfall and poverty. In most parts of Malawi, the rainfall pattern permits only one major harvest a year, in April. Some of the better-off households in Kasiya have access to irrigated garden plots on the river banks that can be harvested several times a year. But for poorer families like Devison's there is only the single season of rainfall, and thus only a single harvest, which is rarely sufficient to feed the family all year round. The months leading up to this harvest, beginning with December, are months of hunger.
Some years are worse than others. The 2002 famine was the worst hunger in several generations, and the 2005/06 lean season was also very bad. It was in this latter period that Devison's son Krispin had to be taken to the Nutritional Rehabilitation Unit (NRU) of the local hospital, 20 kilometres away. 'He was a year old at the time. His whole body was swollen and we didn't know why,' Devison remembers. 'None of us were eating much. We had very little food while we waited for the harvest to come. The three older girls had lost a lot of weight and were very skinny, but he was the only one swollen like this. We were worried, so we took him to the hospital.' As the nurses at the NRU explained to Devison and his wife, the swelling was due to a condition called kwashiorkor, a dangerous form of malnutrition that mainly affects very young children. The exact causes of kwashiorkor are still debated, but likely have to do with a combination of micronutrient deficiency, protein deficiency, and infection. Kwashiorkor usually indicates that children are not only eating less food, but are also eating a less diverse diet; Krispin had little to eat in 2005 other than breast milk and nsima. If left untreated, kwashiorkor can, and often does, kill. Luckily, Krispin was taken to the NRU in time. The nurses treated him with nutrient-rich therapeutic foods, and he recovered.
But in some ways the hunger of 2005/06 never ended. Devison tells us that the search for food and medicine that year drained the family's finances. Surviving the hunger season – much less trying to rebuild their assets – became more and more difficult in subsequent years. Now they own little else but one acre of maize, far less than what is needed to feed the whole family. They try to find whatever additional work they can on other farmers' lands, but jobs are scarce in the hungry season; many other families are looking for work as well.
Devison tells us all of this in quiet, weary tones, which we at first attributed to exhaustion after a hard morning's work in the fields. Devison Banda, though, is more than tired. Like the rest of his family, he is also hungry – tired and hungry and in the middle of the same hard fight that begins every year just before Christmas.
HUNGER IN THE FIELDS
It is a bitter irony that half of the world's hungry people are farmers. But the statistic seems less strange when one considers that for many poor families, farming is an exercise in too little land, erratic rains, and soils worn out by decades of being squeezed for food. A lack of water, nutrients and good seed leads to crop yields far below biological potential, as becomes clear when we compare staple crop productivity per hectare in some of the countries mentioned in this book with productivity in the United States (Figure 1.3). In all cases, yield could at least be doubled; in Malawi, maize yields per hectare could potentially increase tenfold.
Low crop yields compel poor farming families to make decisions that provide short-term returns but have negative longer-term consequences. One example is the practice of harvesting crops in their 'green' immature stage; after the previous year's food stocks run out, there is little choice but to consume this year's harvest as soon as possible. This is an especially common practice for poor maize growers like Devison Banda. Although the caloric value of the maize crop would increase greatly if the cobs were allowed to dry and then ground into flour, hunger pushes many families to harvest the immature cobs, which are then boiled and eaten immediately.
Deforesting hillsides to expand croplands is another example of sacrificing future potential for present need. Although farmers know that cultivating steep slopes will lead to erosion and eventually poor yields, in the short term the extra land may be the difference between hunger and food sufficiency. In the village of Kasiya, the hilly forest areas are thankfully still intact, and shared by the community as an important source of firewood, building materials and medicines. They are also extraordinarily beautiful: diverse multi-layered assemblages of grasses, ferns, shrubs and large hardwood trees, filled with birds and small wildlife. On the day we visited the forest, our 'guide' from Kasiya, a quiet man named Mirion Nkhoma, told us that although the community is fighting to keep the area wild, the pressures of increasing population and poverty endanger the forest's existence more and more with each passing year.
Despite all of these challenges, some farmers do manage in good years to reap a harvest that would be large enough to feed their family the whole year round – if they had a place to store the food and keep it safe from spoilage and pests. In Northern countries, surrounded by refrigerators and grain silos and pest control companies, food spoilage is an afterthought, something that only occurs to families when the milk in the fridge has gone bad. For rural households in poor countries, the issue is much more critical: unable to afford pest-proof storage facilities and living without electrification, families must either eat or sell the harvest quickly, or risk losing a significant portion. The extent of this 'post-harvest loss' is debated within development circles, but traditionally the assumption has been that around one-quarter of all agricultural production in poor countries is lost to pests and spoilage. Such a loss could amount to up to three months' worth of food.
The inability to store food also affects the production decisions a farming family makes; for example, they may choose to grow crops that are low yielding, but store better than more productive crops. The popularity of root crops throughout Sub-Saharan Africa, despite their relatively low cash value, is partially explained by the fact that farm families can store the tubers in the ground itself with minimal loss to pests. But making such a decision means that the full productive potential of the family's resources – land, labour, water, and so on – may not be fully realised.
PRICES AND THE SEASONS
Growing food, however, is not the only way to obtain it: one may buy food as well. Indeed, contrary to the popular perception that many rural households in Africa and Asia produce all their own food needs – the image of the self-sufficient farm family – most actually depend heavily on the market for their food supply. Even families with high levels of agricultural production often sell a major portion of their crop and use the income to diversify their diet, purchasing more calories and nutrients than they would have obtained from eating only the food they grew themselves. Faced with storage problems, poor families would ideally do the same: sell part of the harvest quickly to convert food into cash, which they could then save to buy food later in the year.
Several factors make this strategy difficult, however. One is that prices for food in the post-harvest time are usually very low, due to the fact that the market is flooded by many other farmers also trying to sell their newly harvested crop. Conversely, prices for food are usually very high in the hunger season because few farmers have crops to sell at this time. Figure 1.6 illustrates this phenomenon for millet (the chief staple food) in northern Ghana, and for maize in Mchinji district, Malawi. The price of millet in northern Ghana increased by about 50 per cent between harvest time and the peak of the hunger season in 1988/89. This same pattern was repeated with maize in Malawi in 2000/01 (the year before the famine), but to a much greater extent: maize prices spiralled up by more than 400 per cent between harvest and hunger season, before falling back again at harvest time. The scale and unpredictability of these seasonal price fluctuations are responsible for much of the seasonal hunger that occurs every year in many poor countries across the world.
Seasonal price fluctuation is an odd phenomenon for Northern consumers to consider: imagine that all the prices in the local supermarket doubled or trebled for three months of the year. Why does such volatility happen in poor countries? There are several reasons. One is that storage in pest-proof facilities is expensive, and grain traders pass on these costs to consumers. Furthermore, since only a few wealthy traders can afford the costs, a lack of competition can drive prices even higher. In addition, the fact that many rural communities are often poorly integrated into larger national and global economies, mainly due to weak transport connections to cities and ports, also contributes to seasonal price fluctuations. Although in any given season grain supplies usually exist somewhere nearby, either in the same country or in neighbouring countries, the poor marketing infrastructure makes the costs of moving food from one market to another very high for traders, and once again consumers feel the impact. Thus farm families are caught in a 'price scissors', having to sell low at harvest time and buy (the same food!) high during the lean season. The food value of their cash declines considerably as the months go by.
Another reason why poor families struggle to save their harvest earnings is that, just as food storage facilities do not exist in many rural areas, neither do 'cash storage' facilities such as banks. Overall, less than 10 per cent of people living in rural areas of poor countries access formal financial services. Without financial service providers to store their money safely – and to pay some interest on their savings – cash becomes a risky asset to hold.
Finally, many farm families find it difficult to save a large portion of their harvest profits because they have incurred serious debts over the growing season. Poor families borrow heavily over the course of a normal year to buy agricultural inputs, medicines and emergency food supplies during the hunger season. Lacking access to formal financial institutions, families regularly pay annual interest rates of 100 per cent or more to borrow money from local moneylenders. This debt usually comes due at the harvest time, and there is often little left to be saved for the rest of the year. The lack of access to financial services tailored to their needs is thus crippling for the poor. Effective financial services could not only help buy food in the hunger season and store cash safely, but could also allow improvements in livelihood productivity – for example through the purchase of agricultural inputs like fertiliser or oxen for ploughing – and longer-term investments in health and education.
Thus high food prices, and especially seasonal price spikes, play an important role in causing hunger. But it is also important to remember that food price increases can affect people in the same community differently. The poorest households are often those with little land and a smaller harvest to meet their own food consumption needs. They depend heavily on the market for food, and are thus affected more strongly by prices than farmers with larger tracts of land (and better access to inputs like fertiliser and water), who may be able to fulfil all or almost all of their family's food needs solely from their own production. If these larger farmers have a surplus to sell, they may even benefit from the high hunger season prices. One study, for example, found that a 10 per cent increase in the price of maize in Malawi would have a negative impact on the income of households overall, with the poorest households affected the most. 'Less poor' and 'average' households are less affected than the poorest by the high prices because they depend less on the market, and the richest 20 per cent actually gain from higher prices by selling their surplus crop (Figure 1.7).
THE STRUGGLE TO FIND WORK
For many small farmers, the food and cash gained from agriculture is simply not enough to feed their families year-round. Along with the millions of poor rural families worldwide who have no land at all, they must search for additional work throughout the year. In many rural areas of poor countries, however, regular employment is impossible to find and families often scrape by day-to-day, perhaps working on a wealthier neighbour's farm one day, selling firewood the next. In very difficult times, family members, or even entire families, may migrate long distances in search of employment.
The story of Zara, a woman farmer from Guidan Koura, a village in Niger, typifies this struggle to find work. Like many of Niger's communities, Guidan Koura is located in a harsh semi-desert environment; rain falls only a few months of the year, and irrigation sources are few. Hunger returns every year between April and harvest time in September.
'My farm is small,' Zara tells us, 'more like a garden. And the soil is poor. It gives us no more than two months' worth of millet – in a good year – for my family. We are farmers, yes, but what we can grow is not enough.' So Zara looks for additional work to earn the money her family needs to be able to eat for the rest of the year. Like many women in Guidan Koura, she collects firewood and cattle fodder in the lands around the village, to sell at the local market or exchange for food. She normally earns about CFA750 (91p) daily selling what she has gathered. 'At harvest time, this is enough to buy two kilograms of millet,' she says, 'but before the harvest, prices are high and I can only buy one kilogram. Then everyone in the family needs to cut back and make do with half a portion.' In addition to gathering firewood and cattle fodder, Zara tries to find whatever other work or food she can. 'Sometimes my neighbour asks me to pound millet or sorghum for her. People try to help me, but food is scarce for everyone. Not many can afford to give us any part of the little they themselves have.'
(Continues…)
Excerpted from "Seasons of Hunger"
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Copyright © 2008 Action Against Hunger.
Excerpted by permission of Pluto Press.
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Table of Contents
ForewordIntroduction
Those with Cold Hands
A World Full of Good Ideas
From Policy to Rights
Postscript: Oneness
Appendix A: The Cost of a Minimum Essential Intervention Package to Fight Seasonal Hunger
References and Further Reading
Index