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Seasonality Revisited
New Perspectives on Seasonal Poverty
Stephen Devereux, Rachel Sabates-Wheeler and Richard Longhurst
What is Seasonality and Why Does it Matter?
Seasonality refers to any regular pattern or variation that is correlated with the seasons. âAdverse seasonalityâ describes the potentially damaging consequences for human wellbeing of seasonal fluctuations in the weather, and the full range of its associated impacts on lives and livelihoods. Seasonality was a fashionable theme in development studies from the late 1970s to early 1990s, a period when policymakers and researchers were more interested in tropical agriculture and rural development than they are today. A landmark event was the conference on âSeasonal Dimensions to Rural Povertyâ held at the Institute of Development Studies (IDS) in Brighton in July 1978, which resulted in an eponymous book (Chambers et al., 1981) and an IDS Bulletin (Longhurst, 1986a). Several other books on seasonality followed, including Seasonal Variability in Third World Agriculture (Sahn, 1989), Seasonality and Agriculture in the Developing World (Gill, 1991), and Seasonality and Human Ecology (Ulijaszek and Strickland, 1993).
All these publications identified and provided evidence for a similar set of insights: that climatic seasonality shapes and structures rural lives and livelihoods in the tropics in profound but often negative ways; that consistent patterns in these impacts can be discerned across countries as diverse and distant as Bangladesh and Zambia; and that development interventions must account for seasonality in their design and implementation, or they will be compromised and could even fail.
Sometime in the early 1990s, research and policy interest in seasonality faded away. Perhaps the main reason was a precipitate decline (recently partly reversed) in public investment in agriculture, as governments were discouraged by the prevailing neoliberal orthodoxy from intervening directly in the productive economic sectors, and policymakers shifted their focus to the social sectors instead. A related factor may have been the challenges of implementing effective interventions to counteract the adverse effects of seasonality â especially in the constrained public policy space of the 1990s. On the one hand, factoring seasonality into policy design adds to the complexity of project planning and implementation, requiring inter-sectoral collaboration and joint programming (between agriculture and health, for instance) which is notoriously difficult to achieve. On the other hand, many counter-seasonal measures that were already in place (such as price stabilization and grain reserves) were abolished by the liberalization policies of the 1980s and 1990s, which left governments with very few levers to protect lives and livelihoods in households vulnerable to seasonality. In retrospect, advocacy for seasonality may have had a stronger impact if there had been more sustained efforts to draw attention to the problems that followed the withdrawal of these seasonally sensitive policies.
Of course, just because policymakers forgot about seasonality does not mean it went away. Many of the lessons learned three decades ago remain relevant and accurate today. So what did we learn from the seasonality research of the 1980s?
A defining insight of Seasonal Dimensions to Rural Poverty, edited by Robert Chambers, Richard Longhurst and Arnold Pacey (1981), was that several seasonal aspects of life in tropical countries contribute to creating and reproducing poverty, especially among smallholder farming families. These âdimensionsâ were summarized in a scenario that was found to be generalizable across regions that have pronounced â especially unimodal â seasonality in rainfall.
most of the very poor people in the world live in tropical areas with marked wet and dry seasons. Especially for the poorer people, women and children, the wet season before the harvest is usually the most critical time of year. At that time adverse factors often overlap and interact: food is short and food prices high; physical energy is needed for agricultural work; sickness is prevalent, especially malaria, diarrhoea and skin infections; child care, family hygiene, and cooking are neglected by women overburdened with work; and late pregnancy is common, with births peaking near harvest. This is a time of year marked by loss of body weight, low birth weights, high neonatal mortality, malnutrition, and indebtedness. It is the hungry season and the sick season. It is the time of year when poor people are at their poorest and most vulnerable to becoming poorer.
(Chambers et al., 1981, pxv)
Evidence for seasonal fluctuations in food prices, agricultural wage rates, infectious diseases, birth weights and other indicators was presented from several countries of Africa and south Asia. Affected households were shown to adopt damaging âcoping mechanismsâ, including seasonal migration and taking high-interest loans. Robert Chambers argued that seasonality is âunobservedâ by officials and researchers because of âtarmac biasâ, âactivity biasâ, âirrigation biasâ and âdry season biasâ, but he expressed the hope that the book would raise awareness and âhelp to identify feasible measures [to address] seasonal hardship and impoverishmentâ (Chambers et al., 1981, p6).
A workshop that followed up the 1978 conference resulted in an IDS Bulletin titled âSeasonality and povertyâ (Longhurst, 1986a). This Bulletin focused on how seasonality affects poor people, how they respond to it and how they can be assisted. One lesson for policymakers was that seasonal âcoping strategiesâ need to be better understood, since effective policies should build on what people do already. The role of women in âcopingâ was found to be vital. Ownership of assets â broadly defined to include land, livestock, crops in store, trees, jewellery and social assets such as membership of food-sharing networks â was also identified as crucial for negotiating seasonality, because âasset buffersâ can lift families above a threshold level that protects them against seasonal poverty ratchets. Finally, researchers were advised to take an interdisciplinary perspective and exploit the linkages that exist between our knowledge of natural resources, economic phenomena and social relationships. Rural people experience seasons in a holistic manner, and professional outsiders should do the same.
A conference focusing on seasonality in household food security produced a book titled Seasonal Variability in Third World Agriculture, edited by David Sahn (1989), which documented research on grain marketing and price variability, employment, and the role of technology. Findings confirmed the scenario identified in the 1978 IDS conference. Seasonality creates imbalances between energy intake (food consumption), energy expenditure (on-farm and off-farm labour) and food availability (in granaries and local markets), causing seasonal hunger and malnutrition. Contributors emphasized the need to ascertain what policies need to be pursued to reduce variations in food production, work, incomes and prices. Policies were considered in two groups: untargeted projects and policies that address problems of transitory food insecurity, including price stabilization, infrastructure and technological change and agricultural research; and targeted interventions, generally designed to mitigate directly the consequences of household food insecurity. The latter group were clustered as those policies that generate income through productive work (e.g. labour-intensive public works and home gardens), those that transfer income directly to the household (food stamps and food rations), and those that affect prices faced by market-dependent consumers (e.g. food price subsidies).
Seasonality and Agriculture in the Developing World (Gill, 1991) offers a multidisciplinary âsystemsâ approach. Gill develops an analytical model for examining the impact of seasonality on household income and consumption. Seasonality affects the variance around the mean of incomes, which are respectively higher and lower in developing countries than in richer countries. Moreover, a high variance occasionally trips a mechanism that pushes down mean income, and a falling mean income tends to increase intra-annual variance. Gill suggests that two basic linkages are at work. First, seasonal variations in income impose costs, reducing the proportion of gross income available to meet basic consumption needs. The second linkage is less direct: people who are better off in terms of wealth or social status are able to pass on seasonal stresses to those who are worse off, either temporarily (by appropriating consumption goods in the hungry season) or permanently (by acquiring investment goods). Finally, Gill discusses biases in policy formulation and the problems of collecting suitable seasonally disaggregated information. He examines land reform, mechanization, labour migration and market failures, all from a seasonal perspective.
Seasonality and Human Ecology, edited by Stanley Ulijaszek and S.S. Strickland (1993), is a collection of edited papers from a symposium at Cambridge University of the Society for the Study of Human Biology, which examined the ways in which seasonality influences human biology and behaviour. Contributions from biologists, physiologists, nutritionists and anthropologists confirm that human groups are âenormously sensitiveâ to seasonal cycles within their ecosystems. Systematic seasonal effects are observed in fertility, physical growth in children, infectious diseases (including malaria, measles, dysentery and diarrhoea) and mortality rates (in temperate as well as tropical climates). Finally, several chapters explore seasonal aspects of food security and nutrition. Globally, seasonal nutritional stress was found to be highest in parts of Sahelian Africa (Burkina Faso, the Gambia, Sudan, Ethiopia, Kenya) and India, where the rainfall seasonality index is highest and nutrition status at that time was lowest.
Fifteen years later, Seasons of Hunger (by Stephen Devereux, Bapu Vaitla and Samuel Hauenstein Swan, 2008) drew attention to the fact that seasonal hunger persists but continues to be neglected, even though it is predictable and the causes are well understood. This monograph focuses on policy responses to hunger, from the Famine Codes in colonial India to emergency relief in Africa, and proposes a set of social protection measures to combat seasonal hunger and prevent the need for emergency interventions. The âminimum essential packageâ includes community-based management of acute malnutrition, seasonal employment guarantee schemes, social pensions, and child growth promotion. Where feasible, these interventions should be complemented by weather-indexed agricultural insurance schemes, price banding and strategic grain reserves. The authors conclude by arguing that freedom from hunger should be legally enforced at the global level through a justiciable international right to food.
Insights from the Last 20 Years
Evidence of the damaging consequences of seasonality continued to be reported during the 1990s and 2000s, although not as systematically as in the 1980s. Most of this newer evidence reinforced earlier findings on the seasonality of poverty (Dercon and Krishnan, 1998; Dostie et al., 2002), of nutrition status (Hoorweg et al., 1995), of infectious diseases (Ferro-Luzzi et al., 2001; Kale et al., 2004), and of interactions between illness and poverty (Chuma et al., 2006). Several studies concluded that the adverse consequences of seasonality fall disproportionately on women (Hopkins et al., 1994; Devereux et al., 2006) and children (Masudi et al., 2001; Beegle et al., 2005; Macours and Vakis, 2010). Behavioural responses to seasonality include migration (Hampshire, 2002; de Haan et al., 2002; Deshingkar and Start, 2003; Smita, 2008), anti-social behaviour such as theft (Osborne, 2000; Chiwona-Karltun et al., 2009), and the adoption of potentially harmful âcoping strategiesâ (de Merode et al., 2003; Orr et al., 2009). Note that this review is not exhaustive; the intention instead is to highlight new evidence on selected themes.
Poverty
A study from Madagascar in the early 2000s reported the same patterns of adverse seasonality that were identified by researchers in many other countries during the 1970s and 1980s. An estimated one million Malagasy are pushed below the poverty line during the lean season each year, joining nine million who are chronically poor. Most of this seasonal poverty is concentrated in rural areas, where food prices fluctuate by about 45 per cent over the year compared to just 17 per cent in Antananarivo, the capital city. Seasonal food shortages, high food prices and infectious diseases (especially diarrhoea and malaria) interact to increase rates of malnutrition and mortality. Over a 12-year period, infant mortality was consistently lowest after the harvest (MayâJune) when food is abundant and prices are lowest, but it more than tripled by DecemberâJanuary âwhen the lean and rainy seasons convergeâ (Dostie et al., 2002).
Disaggregated data on seasonal poverty are hard to find. This is because there are significant costs to collecting data throughout a year, then analysing and reporting the findings by season. Also, policymakers prefer a single poverty headcount figure to several. A rare exception is a panel survey in Ethiopia which measured poverty at three different times within a one-year period, revealing pronounced variability between seasons. The poverty headcount among 1411 rural households stood at 34.1 per cent in the lean months before the 1994 main harvest, fell by a quarter to 26.9 per cent around harvest time, but rose again to 35.4 per cent in the 1995 lean season (Dercon and Krishnan, 1998). Seasonal fluctuations in poverty were lower in communities near to towns and with better access to roads, and among households with more physical assets and human capital â confirming that seasonality affects poor and isolated rural households most severely. This sensitivity of poverty prevalence to the time of year that surveys are conducted â let alone to harvest variability between years â highlights the often overlooked fact that seasonality complicates reporting on âaverageâ poverty rates and, especially, estimates of trends in rural poverty over time.
Health and Nutrition
A study of âSeasons and nutrition at the Kenya coastâ (Hoorweg et al., 1995) found that seasonal variations in nutritional status were most pronounced among children and the elderly. Intriguingly, although poorer individuals had the lowest energy intakes, seasonal weight loss was only weakly affected by wealth (lower-income households were actually better able to smooth consumption across the year), but was strongly determined by cropping patterns (food consumption varied more among maize producers than cassava producers) and by access to wage employment at critical times of year. Local farming families depend on market purchases of food in seasons when their granary stocks are low, and they earn income to buy food mainly from wage employment. Household labour power and availability of employment opportunities dictate the effectiveness of this diversification strategy â relying on market purchases to compensate for diminishing food stocks late in the agricultural year â across households and between years.
Diarrhoeal diseases remain a major health risk in tropical countries, especially for children. A study in Ethiopia found that, âfor young children, seasonal weight loss appears to be much more strongly associated with seasonal patterns of diarrhoeal disease than with seasonal changes in food availability in the householdâ (Ferro-Luzzi et al., 2001, pix). Bacterial diarrhoea occurs mainly during wet and warm seasons. Rotavirus infections cause acute watery diarrhoea, which kills between 600,000 and 870,000 infants in developing countries every year (Kale et al., 2004), though this might be falling due to increased uptake of oral rehydration therapy (ORT). Undernutrition raises susceptibility to infection, so child deaths from diarrhoea are concentrated in the hungry season and in poor families.
Cross-country data reveal that malaria and poverty are mutually reinforcing. Average GDP per capita is five times higher in countries where malaria is not endemic, and economic growth rates are 1.3 per cent lower in countries where malaria is endemic, after controlling for factors such as human capital and initial income (Chuma et al., 2006). At the household level, poor people are least able to take preventive measures and to access effective treatment. One study in Kenya found that poor households that experienced major malaria episodes fell deeper into poverty, whereas wealthier households were better able to cope without damaging losses of assets and income (Chuma et al., 2006).
Gender
The adverse effects of seasonal variation are gendered. A survey of 960 farming households in highland Ethiopia in 2006 found that self-reported food shortage peaks during the pre-harvest months of JuneâAugust and drops to its lowest level following the main annual harvest in OctoberâNovember. Moreover, food insecurity is consistently higher among female-headed households, peaking at 68 per cent in July 2006, when it also affected 57 per cent of male-headed households, but dropping to 9 per cent of female-headed and just 3 per cent of male-headed households in November (Devereux et al., 2006).
At the intra-household level, survey data from Niger, disaggregated by season and by gender, reveals that the gender of income earners is an important determinant of seasonal spending on food and non-food items. Spending on food peaks in the pre-harvest rainy season, and is the responsibility of both women and men. Womenâs incomes are lower than menâs, and men also have access to stored grain and to dry season income from seasonal migration. Conversely, women are constrained in their access to credit and savings. This means that women in rural Niger are less able than men to smooth food consumption across seasons (Hopkins et al., 1994, p1225).
Children
Adverse seasonality is bad for childrenâs health, education and nutrition. A study from rural Tanzania found that children are especially susceptible to malaria and diarrhoea, but also to typhoid and cholera, during the rainy season, and to colds, coughing and influenza during the dusty dry season. Drinking water is contaminated during the wet season and scarce during the dry season, causing water to be rationed, with adverse consequences for health and hygiene. School attendance drops during the rains, because paths and roads become degraded making it difficult to get to school, because granaries are empty so children are too hungry to learn, and because children are needed to work on the farm. In tobacco-growing areas, the agricultural labour force is dominated by children, who can work up to 18 hours a day during the picking and curing season (Masudi et al., 2001). The combination of seasonal malnutrition, illness and disrupted education compromises the lifetime potential of affected children and contributes to the intergenerational transmission of poverty.
Seasonality increases the demand for child labour. Poor households and those facing significant income variability are more likely to draw on family members (including children) than hired labour for farming, small business and domestic work. Children in poor rural households with no access to credit are more likely to be withdrawn from school (Beegle et al., 2005).
Migration
Seasonal migration, especially by young men in search of work, is often a response to a lack of local employment opportunities in the dry season, but it is risky and expensive. In West Africa, the income remitted by the poorest migrants is sometimes outweighed by the travel and search costs, as well as weakened social networks back home (Hampshire, 2002). Migrants from middle-income and better-off households are more likely to be successful, because they can invest more in looking for work, their households tend to be larger and have labour capacity to spare, and they can draw on relatives and friends in destination communities for advice and support (de Haan et al., 2002). A study of seasonal migration in India focused on the challenges that this creates for access to services and to support from government programmes: âoutside their home areas, migrants have no entitlements to livelihood support systems or formal w...
