IDS BULLETIN Seasonality and Poverty
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Seasonality and Poverty
SUMMARY
Seasonality and Ultrapoverty
Michael Lipton
The ultra-poor — a group of people who eat below 80 per cent of
(heir energy requirements despite spending at least 80 per cent of
income on food — are most vulnerable to seasonal fluctuations in
food supply and wage employment, and seasonally induced
nutrition and health risks Lowenergy intakes are linked with greater
seasonal instability, and seasonal fluctuations in employment are
also greatest for the ultra-poor. The poor in sub-Saharan Africa are
likely to suffer more in these respects than their Asian counterparts
because of their less developed irrigation and transport systems.
This influences the cropping pattern of African farmers. As
population pressure intensifies in Africa, public spending in support
of the farm sector is required to reduce the bad season impact on the
ultra-poor. Of particular importance are policies to support
migrants, provide rural credit and to manage common property
resources.
Women and Seasonality: Coping with Crisis and Calamity
Janice Jiggins
This article explores the contribution of female production, labour
and domestic domain services to the management of seasonal
stress, crisis and calamity, under the headings; switching tasks and
responsibilities ascribed by gender; diversifying household income
sources', changing the intensity and mix of multiple occupations:
household gardening and common property resources, food
processing, preservation and preparation; social organisation; gift
giving. It offersan analysis of adversity and calamity which pinpoints
the resilience of networks of female-headed households and raises
new questions concerning risk preference, probability assessment
and the valuation of female labour time.
Food Shortages and Seasonality in WoDaaBe Communities In Niger
Cynthia White
Data on WoDaaBe nomadic pastoralists in central Niger demon
strate that seasonality, through a coincidence of stress factors in the
dry and transition seasons, clearly does reinforce poverty in this
group. Although important, dry season hardship is merely a
symptom of more crucial political ano economic factors affecting
the WoDaaBe economy.
Household Food Strategies in Response to Seasonality and Famine
Richard Longhurst
Rural families have a range of strategies with which to cope with
seasonal and inter-seasonal fluctuations in food supply For landed
households the most important seasonal strategies include choice
of cropping patterns to spread risks involving mixed cropping.
cultivation of secondary crops, particularly root crops Other
seasonal coping mechanisms include sale of small assets and
livestock, drawing down of stored product and cultivation of
supportive social relationships. Off-farm income earning work
provides one of the best buffers against seasonal stress. If a bad
season stretches into a prolonged drought, or if there is a sudden
drop in purchasing power, then these activities are further
intensified, but families are forced into divesting resources; selling
productive assets, constricting food intake, and migration. If
investment in rural areas and food production recognised these
strategies the severe impact of famine could be avoided
Biomass, Man and Seasonality in the Tropics
Colin Leakey
Agricultural research linked to government policies to increase the
availability of biomass to provide food, forage and medicine requires
a re-think. In particular, by ignoring trees and gathered foods.
policies have not met demands for food in arid areas, and an
emphasis on increasing production per unit area has accentuated
seasonality of production by favouring selection of crop species
requiring longer periods of moisture availability. The use of plants
for medicines, stimulants and control of fertility also has important
seasonal effects, but has received minimal attention to date. The
classification of Raunkiaer, who distinguished plants on the basis of
their modes of protection and size of buds, enables an analysis
related to their effective use of moisture and temperature, so
providing a framework for linking the seasonal production of
biomass to human needs
Trees, Seasons and the Poor
Robert Chambers and Richard Longhurst
Trees play a significant role in poor people's seasonal livelihoods:
this has been a neglected subject due to interlocking biases against
understanding how the poor secure their incomes, and ignorance of
the multipurpose role of trees. Trees play an important seasonal role
through their physical characteristics: deep rooting with access to
moisture and nutrients year round Accumulation of stocks in the
form of wood and various beneficial environmental effects. Trees
seasonally stabilise, protect and support the livelihoods of the rural
poor and policies can be designed which reinforce this important
role
Seasonality In a Savanna District of Ghana — Perceptions of Women
and Health Workers
Gill Gordon
Households in a coastal district of Ghana aim to maintain a constant
supply of food by farming, fishing and trading. Trading in processed
foods is highly competitive in the rainy season. Many families
respond to adverse farming or trading conditions by temporary
migration. Seasonal stress reduces women's ability to care for their
children and make use of health services Village health workers
perceive their farm work to be of higher priority than their health
tasks at a time when demand for their services is greatest. This article
suggests measures to reduce the impact of seasonal stress on
households and health workers.
Access to Food, Dry Season Strategies and Household Size
amongst the Bambara of Central Mali
Camilla Toulmin
This article describes the seasonal variation in production and
household organisation in a Sahelian farming village. With the
loosening of domestic responsibilities, once tne harvest is stored.
the dry season offers a range of income-earning activities for the
individual to pursue. Those from gram surplus households can use
this period to build up private sources of wealth. Grain deficit
households must use dry season incomes to help them get through
the next farming season. This differential capacity to make use of the
dry season accentuates differences in household size and wealth
Seasonality and Poverty: Implications for Policy and Research
Richard Longhurst, Robert Chambers and Jeremy Swilt
There is great diversity in the way different groups of people are
affected by seasonality and cope with it. Greater understanding of
this diversity is required if policy and project interventions are to
strengthen the position of poor rural people. The damaging periods
of time can sometimes be very short, regularly crippling families in
their efforts to accumulate resources and protect their health. In
sub-Saharan Africa seasonality is clearly a major dimension of
adverse economic change, of declining food availability and
increasing instability in food supply. As a result seasonality has
become a more significant point of entry for analysis and action.
Policies are needed which strengthen seasonal coping mechanisms.
and reflect a decentralised and differentiated approach in timing and
targetting on the most vulnerable groups.
RESUME
Les Variations Salsonnleres et I'Ultra-pauvrete
Michael Lipton
Les ultra-pauvres — un groupe consommant moins de 80% de ses
besoins en Energie, bien que 80% de ses revenus soient consacres a
la nourriture — sont les plus vulnerables a la fluctuation saisonniere
des salaires. de I'approvisionnement en nourriture et aux risques de
same et de nutrition que cette fluctuation engendre. L'insuffisance
des rations alimentaires est liee a une plus grande instability
saisonniere. et la fluctuation saisonniere de I'emploi est plus
importante chez I’ultra-pauvre. Dans ce sens, le pauvre en Afrique
Sub-saharienne souflre probablement plus que son homologue
asiatique car ses systemes d'irrigation et de transport sont moins
developpes. Ceci influence les habitudes de culture des fermiers
africains. Comme la pression de la population s'intensifie en Afrique.
il devient necessaire d'allouer des fonds publics en aide au secteur
agricole pour reduire I'effet de la mauvaise saison sur les ultrapauvres. Des mesures en aide aux migrants, favorisant le
debloquement de credits pour le secteur rural et ('administration des
resources communautaires sont done d'une importance toute
particuliere.
Les Femmes et les Variations Saisonnidres: Falre face aux Crises et
aux Catamites
Janice Jiggins
Sous les titres suivants. cet article explore la contribution que les
femmes apportent a I'organisation de la tension saisonniere. aux
crises et aux desastres, par leur production, leur labeur et leurs
services dans le domaine domestique; changement dans les travaux
et les responsabilites assignes par le genre; diversifier les sources de
revenu du menage; changer ('intensity et (association oes
occupations multiples; culture du jardin familial et resources
communautaires; traitement, conservation et preparation de la
nournture; organisation sociale, echange de dons II offre une
analyse des concepts d'adversile et de calamity qui cerne la
resistance des reseaux de manages ou la femme est chef de famille
et soulevent de nouvelles questions concernant les priorites vis a vis
des risques a prendre, les calculs de probability et revaluation du
temps de travail de la femme
P^nurie de Nourriture et Variations Saisonnieres dans les
Communautes WoDaaBe au Niger
Cynthia White
Une collection de donnyes sur les eleveurs nomades WoDaaBe dans
le centre du Niger nous montre que les variations saisonnieres par la
coincidence de facteurs de tension durant la saison seche et les
saisons de transition, renforcent trds clairement le niveau de
pauvretc de ce groupe Bien qu'importante. la privation causee par la
saison seche n'est qu'un symptome d'elements economiques et
politiques plus importants qui affectent I'economie des WoDaaBe
Strategies des Families pour la Production de Nourriture en
Reponse aux Variations Saisonniferes et a la Famine
Richard Longhurst
Les families rurales ont toute une syrie de strategies qui les aident a
faire ux fluctuations saisonnieres et mter-salsonmeres de l approvisionnement en nourriture Pour les menages proprietaires terriens.
afin de diminuer les risques. les strategies saisonnieres les plus
importantes comprennent le choix de I'echelonnement des recoltes
necessitant une culture mixte. la culture de plantes secondaires en
particulier de plantes a racmes. D autres mecamsmes saisonmers
les aident a faire face au probleme. tels la venle de petits biens et de
batail, la limitation des produits emmagasines el I'entretien de
relations sociales de soutien mutuel. Un travail salarie procurant un
revenu independent de celui de la ferme esl une des meilleures
garantie contre les tensions saisonnieres. Si une mauvaise saison se
prolonge pour devonir une secheresse ou qu'une baisse soudaine de
pouvoir d'achat se produise. alors ces activites s'intensifient encore
plus, mais les families sont obligees d'avoir recours a des moyens
dypreciatifs: vente de biens productifs. reduction des rations de
nourriture. migration. Si les investissements dans les secteurs
ruraux et de la production ahmentaire tenaient compte de ces
strategies. I'effet desastreux de la famine pourrait etre evite.
Biomasse, I'Homme et les Variations Saisonnieres sous les Tropiques
Cotin Leakey
II est necessaire de repenser la recherche agronomique associee
aux mesures gouvernementales visant a ameliorer (accessibility a la
masse biologique afin de fournir de la nourriture. du fourrage el oes
medicaments. En particulier. ces mesures en ne tenant pas compte
des arbres et de la nourriture rycoltee par la cueillette. n'ont pas
satisfait les besoins alimentaires des regions andes. et la
concentration des efforts sur I'augmenlation du taux de production
a I'unite a accentuy les variations saisonnieres de la production en
favorisant la selection d'especes nycessitant de plus longues
periodes d'humidity. L'ultilisation de plantes pour la fabrication de
remedes. de stimulants et pour le controle de la fertility a aussi des
effets saisonniers importants, auxquels. jusqu’a present, il n'a ete
porte qu'un minimum d'attention La classification de Raunkiaer. qui
eta blit une distinction entre les dilferentes plantes en utilisant leurs
modes de protection et la dimension de leurs bourgeons rend
possible une analyse basee sur leur besom effectif en humidite et
temperature, nous donnant ainsi un cadre de travail qui nous permet
detablir le lien entre les besoins humains et la production
saisonniere de masse biologique.
Les Arbes. les Saisons et le Pauvre
Roobert Chamber et Richard Longhurst
Les arbres jouent un rdle considerable dans les moyens de
subsistence saisonniers des populations pauvres- un sujet neglige a
cause de connexions complexes entre differents prejuges qui
empechent de comprendre la maniere dont le pauvre assure ses
revenus. et (’ignorance concernant les roles et usages multiples des
arbres De part leurs caracteristiques physiques, les arbres jouent un
role saisonmer important des racines profondes qui ont acces a
I'humidite et aux substances nutritives toute I'annye. une saison ou
ils produisent des fruits et une ou ils ensemencent des graines qui
s'etendent sur de longues periodes. ils contribuent a une
accumulation de stocks en bois. et ont bien d'autres effets
benefiques sur I'environement. Les arbres. au fil des saisons.
stabilised, protectent et soutiennent les moyens de subsistence des
populations rurales pauvres et des mesures peuvent etre prises de
mamere a renforcer ce role important.
Variations Saisonnieres dans une Region de Savane au Ghana —
Remarques faites par des Femmes et des Aides medicaux
Gill Gordon
Les families dans une region cohere du Ghana s'efforcent de
maintemr un approvisionnement constant en nourriture. par
('agriculture, la peche et le commerce. Le commerce d'aliments
transformes est extrymement competitif durant la saison des pluies
En reponse a de mauvaises conditions pour ('agriculture ou le
commerce beaucoup de families choisissent une migration
temporaire Pour les femmes, la tension saisonniere diminue leur
aptitude a prendre soin de leurs enfants et utiliser les services de
sante Dans les villages a une epoque ou la demande pour leurs
services atteint son maximum, les aides medicaux ont remarquy que
le travail de la ferme a priorite sur leurs devoirs concernant la sante
Cet article suggere des mesures pour reduire I'effet de la tension
saisonniere sur les families et les aides mydicaux
Acces a la Nourriture, Strategies de la Saison Seche et Dimension de
la Famille chez les Bambara dans le centre du Mall
Camilla Toulmin
Cet article illustre la variation saisonniere de la production el de
I'organisation de la famille dans un village fermier du Sahel Avec le
relachement aes responsabilites domestiques. une fois la recolte
engrangee la saison seche offre a I'individu un choix d'activites
salariees. Les membres d un menage ayant un surplus en gram.
peuvent mettre a profit cette periode pour accumuler des biens
Ceux qui ont un deficit en gram ooivent utiliser les revenus de la
saison seche dans I'attente de la prochaine saison agricole. Cette
inegalite dans leur aptitude a utiliser la saison seche accentue les
differences dans la dimension et la fortune des menages.
Variations Saisonnieres et Pauvrety: Consequences pour la
Recherde et la Politique a sulvre
Richard Longhurst. Robert Chambers et Jeremy Swift
II y a une grande diversite dans la maniere dont differents groupes
sont affectes par les variations saisonnieres et la maniere a laquelle
ils y font face II nous faut attemdre un plus haut degre de
comprehension de la nature de cette diversity si I'on veut que des
mesures et projets d intervention renforcent la position des
populations rurales pauvres Les periodes nefastes peuvent
quelquefois etre de tres courte duree, mais endommagcnt
regulierement les efforts portes par les families a ('accumulation de
biens et la protection de leur sante En Afrique sub-saharienne. il est
evident que les variations saisonnieres sont une dimension majeure
d'un changement economique defavorable. dun declin de la
disponibihte de la nourriture et d'une augmentation dans I'instabilile
de l approvisionnemenl. En consequence, les variations saisonnieres
sont devenues un point de depart plus significatiI pour une analyse
et une ligne d'action. II faut done prendre des mesures qui renforcent
les mecanismes saisonniers de defense et refletent une approche
decentrahsee et differenciee dans le temps ayant pour but les
groupes les plus vulnerables
RESUMEN
Estacionalidad y ultrapobreza
Michael Lipton
Los ultrapobres — un grupo de personas que consumen menos del
80% de sus requenmientos energeticos. pese a que gastan al menos
80% de su ingreso en alimentos — son los mis vulnerables a las
fluctuaciones estacionales de la oferta de alimentos y del empleo
remunerado. asi como a los riesgos sobre la nutricidn y la salud
inducidos por la estacionalidad. El bajo consumo energytico esta
vinculado a la mayor inestabilidad estacional y ademas las
fluctuaciones estacionales del empleo tambien son mayores para
los ultrapobres. Los pobres del subsahara africano esian expuestos
a sufrir mas que sus contrapartes asiaticos, a raiz del menor
desarrollo desus sistemas de riego y transporie Este hecho afecta el
Editorial
Rural poverty in developing tropical countries has a
seasonal dimension. There is a simultaneous prevalence
of sickness, malnutrition, indebtedness, hard work,
discomfort and poor food availability at certain times
of the year, usually during the rains. This period
before harvest — ‘the hungry season' — is one of
considerable stress for rural people, exacerbating their
poverty. Poor people are less able to cope with this
regular period of stress than rich people, who can
usually exploit it to their benefit. The difficulties and
stress experienced on a seasonal basis are, of course,
anticipated by poor rural people: they are a regular
event to be navigated each year. There are different
ways of coping — of moving resources around — in
ways that relate to productive activities and social and
demographic mechanisms. Some of these mechanisms
are described in this Bulletin. In calling this issue
‘Seasonality and Poverty’, the focus is on how
seasonality affects poor people, how they respond to it
and how development can assist them in the face of
these stresses.1
The seasonal problems of rural people vary between
different environments. They relate to the nature of
the local ecology and natural rhythms of plant and
animal growth, local production and income
generating activities and cultural patterns. The
reaction of individuals and communities in pastoral
areas will vary compared to those of, for example,
communities of cultivators. The overall wealth of a
community or a family could lift them above or
depress them below the critical level of livelihood
which determines whether seasonal stress leads to*
The papers in this Bulletin are des eloped from an IDS conference
held al Stafford House. Hassocks, Sussex on 13-15 February. I9S5.
and organised by Robert Chambers. Richard Longhursl and
Jeremy Swift. Acknowledgement is due to those attending the
workshop for contributions to the discussion and conclusions. They
were Caroline Allison. David Butcher. Robert Chambers. Alison
Evans, Catharine Geissler. Gill Gordon, Patrick Hardcastle Ccd
Hesse, Janice Jiggins. Colin Leakey, Michael Lipton. Richard
Longhursl. Penelope Neslel, Clare Oxby, Claudia Pcndred. Sara
Randall, David Salm, Jeremy Swift. Camilla Toulmm and Cynthia
White
IDS Buttenn. 19X6 >ul I7no.l Institute orDeidupnwiil Smdio. Sussex
constraints, preventing families from meeting sub
sistence needs without some loss of function. The
many and varied environments in which seasonal
influences operate are also described in the Bulletin.
Seasonal stresses are not the only contingency faced by
rural people and although regular, may be less severe
than the irregular unanticipated problems created by
variations in food and employment availability
between, rather than within years. Two or three poor
years of food production can often lead to famines, as
seen recently in parts of sub-Saharan Africa. A third
even more spasmodic and random contingency can be
that which strikes individual families tn the form of a
sudden death, an accident incapacitating working
members or a huge, although generally expected,
expenditure such as for a wedding or birth naming
ceremony. When these contingencies overlap, as they
can do for families at a certain stage in its life cycle,
inhabiting areas that are drought prone, then the
family is likely to be driven into deep impoverishment.
The context in which seasonal factors influence
economic development is clearly as important as the
nature of those seasonal forces. The contingencies
described above broaden seasonality beyond a narrow
definition and place it within this wider context. The
way in which people respond to stress and its corollary
— how development and policy can strengthen
people’s ability to withstand stress — requires this
wider definition. This suggests three levels of analysis
to seasonal problems, especially within conditions
seen today in sub-Saharan Africa. These involve the
examination of relationships between first, different
types of seasonal patterns and the importance of
particular types of significant elements; second,
regular patterns and irregular bad years which throw
regular seasons out of gear, and third, regular seasonal
fluctuations and those underlying the economy such
as long-term declines in food production, availability
of able-bodied workers in rural areas, degradation of
the environment, erosion of common property
resources and so on
The need to develop the links between seasonality per
sc and the other processes of impoverishment has been
reinforced by the experience of policy-makers and
researchers since the conference on Seasonality held at
IDS in 1978 pulled together case studies and focused
thinking more intensively on seasonal issues
[Chambers, Longhurst and Pacey 1981]. Policy
makers do regard seasonal phenomena and the inter
relationships between them as too important to
ignore, and believe that resources applied to
alleviating seasonal hardship would bring considerable
benefits. The argument for seasonality-related inter
ventions has often revolved around one of cost
effectiveness: that resources applied at specific times
of year will be more effective than strategies that exist
all year round, and that raising people above the
seasonal threshold will remove a constraint that will
encourage self sustaining growth
In proposing this argument it has sometimes been
difficult to see how interventions could be successfully
timed — switched on and switched off — in locations
where the administration of programmes and projects
is always difficult and where withdrawing services and
resources would be unacceptable to all concerned.
Some interventions of this type are feasible and
include selective use of public works, services related
to specific farming operations and timing of educat ion
services. But generally the subject now needs to be
approached from the point of view of influencing
existing policies by seeking to incorporate an element
that will cope with seasonal stress — by spreading it
out, reducing it or by strengthening buffers that exist
to counter its worst effects. This approach — to
‘season proof development policy — inevitably leads
into more demanding research and policy territory.
but avoids the danger of relegating seasonally to an
interesting but intractable phenomenon.
Three themes in the Bulletin appear of importance to
the editor, with no apologies made for their
obviousness. The first is that already mentioned: poor
rural people have means of coping — up to a point —
with stress from expected seasonal events and
contingencies. The nature of these individual and
household level strategies is mentioned or described in
detail for different parts of the world in nearly all of
the articles in the Bulletin. This frequency of
examination of such strategies is important because
policies should build on what people do already if
poverty — seasonal or general — is to be reduced.
Second, the ownership of assets is an important means
of remaining independent of seasonal stress. Their sale
(or mortgaging) is a major instrument used by people
to cope but in so doing they run the severe risk of
becoming poorer as a result. Asset sale leads to further
accentuation of the unequal distribution of resources.
2
What assets are important is obvious in most cases,
less so in a few others. In physical form, they include
land, livestock, crops in store, dung, trees, household
implements and jewellery; social assets include
membership of occupational groups and foodsharing
networks. People make use of other resources by
diversifying income sources, often by intensive use of
natural resources. The wide range of uses made by
people of plants, trees, livestock and other animals is
evident in several articles. The natural environment
provides many seasonal buffers. Conservation of
natural resources and measures to reconstitute assets
after sale — or better to avoid sale in the first place
— are important.
Third, to counter seasonal poverty we must continue
to take a firmly interdisciplinary line and to exploit the
linkages that exist between our knowledge of natural
resources, economic phenomena and social relation
ships. Rural people look at seasons in a holistic
manner and so there is no reason why professional
outsiders should not do the same.
The bias in the Bulletin is towards articles that refer to
sub-Saharan Africa, but many carry important
implications for development in other parts of the
world, Michael Lipton, for example, reviews his
research on the poor and ultra poor from a seasonal
perspective and shows that reaction to seasonality is
one of many variables which distinguishes these two
groups. Differences exist in labour force behaviour,
demographic structure and asset and land character
istics. The ultra poor do have more unstable diets
seasonally than their poor counterparts; in terms of
labour supply, fluctuations are greatest for the poor
and the wage rate falls and fluctuates in a most
damaging way for them. Janice Jiggins examines the
means whereby women cope with seasonality,
reminding us that there arc considerable differences
within households in terms of suffering from
seasonality and response to it. Experience suggests
that harmful effects are often handed on from men to
women. Attention is drawn to the resilience of
women's social networks.
The two studies from the Sahel, by Camilla Toulmin
among the Bambara of Central Mali and Cynthia
White on the WoDaaBc in Niger examine strategics
adopted by those pastoral communities in response to
seasonality. Toulmin emphasises the importance of
off-farm income sources and also shows how lai ger
households are more able to withstand the negative
effects of seasonality. White shows how large-scale
animal losses by families in bad years used to be made
up, but new forms of development have ma e
pastoralists more vulnerable. As a result permanent
impoverishment can follow but policies cou
e
designed to mitigate this. Richard Longhurst reviews
the household food security strategies adopted by
households, with particular reference to northern
Nigeria. Such strategies include crop diversification
and mixed cropping approaches, the building up of
stores such as body fat, small stocks, and grain, short
or long-term migration, and the development of social
contracts between families and communities. The way
in which these seasonal strategies are extended in the
face of famine conditions is shown for other parts of
the world, including Rajasthan in India.
The research efforts of natural scientists often ignore
seasonal factors. The crops, trees and agricultural
systems that arc encouraged often do not help people
in meeting seasonal food supplies. Colin Leakey
proposes a revival of thinking along the lines of life
forms in relation to adapting to different climates and
hence seasonal production of biomass. On the same
theme Chambers and Longhurst show how trees have
been ignored as important seasonal buffers for the
poor: as sources of food, forage and incomes. Yet it is
clear that they play essential roles in alleviating
seasonal hardships.
The extent of migration as another seasonal buffer is
described in several articles. Gill Gordon’s case study
from Ghana shows the impact of migration on child
nutrition and health which previous work has shown
to be seriously affected by seasonal changes. She
makes suggestions for primary health care measures
which can provide for better child health in the wet
season.
The final article on the implications of seasonal factors
for research and policy indicates the need to think
carefully about location and target groups. Seasonality
needs to be integrated into development policy, but a
fair amount of‘fine tuning’ will be required so that
people do not become improverished either by
seasonal influences or by the very policies that are
designed to help them.
R.L.
Reference
Chambers, R., R. Longhurst and A. Pacey (eds.). 1981,
Seasonal Dimensions to Rural Poverty, Frances Pinter.
London
3
Seasonality and Ultrapoverty
Michael Lipton
I
The Distinction between Poor and
Ultra-poor
Ultra-poor people are those who live in ultra-poor
households. These are households with so little
income per consumption unit that — if they adopt
spending patterns (both among foods and as between
them and non-foods) typical of their household size,
composition and income — they are in a typical week
able to eat so little food as to be a significant risk of not
meeting their dietary energy requirement. In yearround or seasonally-spaced surveys, ultra-poor
households, as a proportion of all households in any
group, can be estimated by finding the proportion who
follow the ‘two 80 per cent rule’: i.e. the proportion
eating below 80 per cent of FAO/WHO (1973) weightadjusted dietary energy requirements, despite spending
at least 80 per cent of income on food. Although for
most low-income countries only 2-5 per cent of
persons, in typical surveys not carried out in acute
famines, either suffer from grade III anthropometry or
fall into severely undernourished groups [Bengoa and
Donoso 1974; Keller and Fillmore 1983] — and
although it is only severe undernourishment that is
linked to functional impairment [Lipton 1983] —
many more people are at risk of falling into such
groups if bad life events, years, and/orseasons overlap
or coincide. For most low-income countries, 10-20 per
cent of people appear to fall into these ultra-poor
groups, i.e. to follow the ‘two 80 per cent’ rule at any
given moment of survey; such people, and especially
their children, would be at quite substantial risk of
descending into the severely undernourished 2-5 per
cent, if their ultra-poverty were long sustained.
ultra-poor have sharply higher child/adult ratios; and
are especially likely to be landless, or (in semi-arid
areas) to operate below five acres or so. The ultra-poor
also differ in certain labour-market characteristics.
Although, even among the poor, lower income
induces higher participation in work, this does not
work among the ultra-poor, perhaps because they are
too often hungry or ill. Also the ultra-poor, being
more often dependent on casual labour than are other
groups, show higher unemployment — but the places,
years and seasons of substantially higher unemploy
ment feature only slight reductions in labour supply
(participation), and therefore somewhat lower real
wage-rates [Lipton 1983a, 1983b, 1983c, 1985b].
If the ultra-poor are at much greater risk, especially of
lasting harm to under-fives, from undernutrition —
and if their conditions make a normal response to
investments or incentives, e.g. via raised workforce
participation, specially difficult, and appear to
mandate a ‘food first' approach — then the separate
identification of these ultra-poor households is crucial
for the success of targeted policies against poverty.
For example, in Kenya, areas with only slightly above
average incidence of poor people have, much greater
measured severity of poverty [Greer and Thorbecke
1986], probably indicating a much greater proportion
of ultra-poor (among the poor as a whole) than in
other areas. These very poor areas, at least a priori,
appear likely to be risky and unirrigated; the effects of
seasonality, in such areas especially, upon the ultra
poor therefore merits close attention.
II
There are quite sharp turning points in food behaviour
[Rao 1981; Lipton 1983a, 1985a; Edirisinghe and
Poleman 1983J as between the ultra-poor, who follow
the ‘two 80 per cent’ rule, and everybody else,
including the moderately poor. Only the ultra-poor
appear to maintain the ratio of food outlay — and
even of outlay on coarse, low-cost energy sources — to
income, when they become a little better off. Also the
tos Bulletin. I9S6. vol 17 no 3. Inslilulc of Development Studiev. Suvsee
4
Seasonal Differentiation
Very interesting inferences arc suggested by Dr.
Emmy Simmons’s work on three villages in northern
Nigeria [Lipton 1983a:42j. Non-poor households
thereshow no relationship of calories per consumption
unit to seasonal instability. Those with very low
income per consumption unit — who normally
average below 2,200 kcal per consumption unit per
day over the year — show some tendency to suffer
from greater seasonal variation as average intake
declines. For those who are at slight risk of
undernutrition, with intakes ofdictary energy between
2,200 and 2,700 kcal daily, this intake is very weakly
correlated with income per consumption unit; they
also show a strong negative link between low intake
and seasonal instability.
This suggests that the severity of nutrition risk among
the ultra-poor is linked to both hunger and seasonal
instability. However, it also suggests that the apparent
degree and indeed presence of caloric inadequacy
among moderately poor people — who seem at first
glance to have nutritionally borderline intakes of
calories — is really due largely to
choices,
corresponding to differences in requirements, rather
than to severe hunger (which one would expect to be
income-linked in its intensity within the group
counted as being at slight risk) or to average yearround income. The capacity to keep out of ultra
poverty may partly depend on adjustment mechanisms
which permit persons within a group, who have
relatively low average of intake to requirements, to
adjust more effectively in seasons when that intake
declines, because of falling intakes, rising requirements
or both. Such adjustment seems to work for the group
of persons at slight risk of undernutrition, but not for
the group at high risk, as the above relationships
indicate. Those at high risk overlap fairly closely, in
these northern Nigerian villages, with those following
the ‘two 80 percent rule’. A related finding in Matlab,
Bangladesh, is that landless mothers showed both
lower average dietary energy intake and greater
seasonal fluctuation than did mothers with land
[Chambers, Longhurst and Pacey 1981:59J.
What of seasonality in labour income, the largest part
of most poor people’s incomes? Age- and sex-specific
participation rates, real wage-rates, and unemployment
all tend to fluctuate seasonally, and to do so most
seriously for casual workers, females, and the ultra
poor. In the Indian National Sample Survey in 197778, adult female participation rates fell nine percent in
rural areas, but six per cent in urban areas, from the
July-September, 1977, seasonal peak to the AprilJune, 1978, trough; adult male rates fell by only
three per cent and one per cent respectively. These
comparative patterns are confirmed by State and
village data, especially for casual workers [Lipton
1983b],
There are interactions between seasonal fluctuations
in participation rates and in employment. The latter
are also worst for the poorest people, since these are
residual workers; in slack seasons, small farmers can
adequately supply their labour requirements with
family workers, and tend to lay off casual (landless)
employees first — especially women — so as to
minimise search and supervision costs of labour.
(Such employees are also likeliest to be under
nourished, and hence toshow low labour-productivity,
in the slack season.) In the 18 poorest households in
four villages in Gujarat, adult-days in the workforce,
as a proportion of all adult-days, fell from 38 per cent
(peak) to 32 per cent (trough); in the best-off eight
households in these villages, all with no participating
female workers, the corresponding proportions of
adult-days remained steady, at 43-45 per cent, from
peak to trough [Lipton 1983b:35]. These patterns are
broadly confirmed in northern Nigerian villages.
The policy implications, tn respect of building up
slack-season female employment (for example with
public works schemes), require caution. We find a
serious slow-down in weight gain, among children
aged less than 18 months, in the slack season in Shubh
Kumar’s study in Kerala, India — but this slow-down
happens only among children whose mothers are in
the workforce but outside the home enterprise, i.e. the
poorest, who must rely on casual employment rather
than self-employment [Kumar 1977], Indeed, extra
female income appears to assist slack-season child
nutrition only if earned in the family enterprise
[Kumar 1977:33],
Due to ‘disguises’ such as slack-season expansion of
cattle care and domestic work, unemployment
fluctuations are understated even in carefully collected
village-level data. However such fluctuations remain
significant, and affect the poorest worst, partly
because — as we have seen — in slack seasons
employees from poor households are ‘crowded out’ by
the self-employed on small-to-medium family farms.
This also happens in bad years; in the 1974-75
drought, in six villages of Gujarat, there was a fall of
55 per cent in family labour use from the previous
year’s level, but of88 percent in casual labour [Lipton
1983b:57]. However, generally, slack-season labour
supply (as measured by the workforce participation
rate) falls less than demand (as measured by the
proportion of participants finding employment), so
that real wage-rates fall alongside both (given that the
elasticity of labour supply is not much below that of
labour demand). Casual labourers, the most likely to
be in ultra-poor households, tend to experience most
acutely this seasonal conjunction of low employment,
participation, and wage-rate.
What compensatory seasonal policies might exist?
Irrigation, and seasonal compensatory employment
schemes like Maharashtra’s Employment Guarantee
Scheme, often appear to raise employed time most for
women, casual workers, and people from low statusgroups [Lipton 1983b:84-5]. Also, price compensation
may be possible. Matlab data show rice prices highest,
and household cereal stocks lowest, when seasonal
5
wage-rates and employment arc least, and this is
confirmed for Bangladesh [Chambers. Longhurst and
Pacey 1981:55. 89-90]. Modern varieties of cereals arc
often associated with some declines in the seasonal
variability of outputs, because they often do best in
irrigated conditions outside the main (rainy) cropping
season. The resulting price stabilisation across seasons
(which can be supplemented by public food grain
releases in seasons of scarcity, if output growth due to
modern varieties has permitted stockbuilding, as in
India) can reduce seasonal vulnerability for the poor
— which helps them even in parts of the country where
the modern varieties have not prospered, but can be
purchased, at less inflated prices than previously, in
slack seasons or bad years.
Ill
Is Sub-Saharan Africa Different?
SSA generally has more extreme seasonality, but less
inequality among the rural poor, than other
developing areas. Seasonality is generally more
extreme than in Asia in comparable semi-arid tropical
zones, partly because there is less irrigation in SSA,
partly because its porous, sandy soils retain less
moisture. Offsetting this, the tropical rainforests of
SSA may suffer from even less seasonality than
elsewhere, because these are in general less exploited,
at least than their Asian counterparts — and larger
proportions of rural people depend on rainforest
cultivation in Africa than elsewhere; but population
growth and shortening fallows render this compen
sation less and less important as time goes by.
Everywhere, water control seems to be less in Africa —
below three per cent of crop land is irrigated, as
against over 30 per cent in Asia. Moreover long
distances and bad transport systems impede seasonal
corrections by way of movements of inter-regional
(price-compensating) grain, and even of labour. At
least since 1960, experience suggests that African
climates are less predictable, more prone to greater
harshness in bad years, and more liable to successive
bad years, than Asian climates. All this reinforces the
harm done by a given degree of seasonal instability.
Moreover, in much of SSA, seasonal (and other)
variations impinge more directly on poor people than
is the case in South Asia, because a larger proportion
of poor people retain usufructuary rights over
cultivated land, and fewer have non-agricultural
employment income. Furthermore, tribal tenure
rights deny poor African farmers the ‘last resort’ of
their Asian counterparts in really bad times, vfz.
mortgage. For all these reasons it is not surprising that
African smallholders are much more prone to use
intercropping to reduce risks than are Asian
smallholders, and also to select crops with low
seasonal specificity (roots and tubers in many cases),
or low vulnerability to moisture stress (millet.
sorghum), as compared with their Asian counterparts
6
who try to select wheat or rice as main crops, soil and
water permitting.
However, population growth in sub-Saharan Africa
is eroding many of the differences — favourable and
unfavourable — between its regions and similar ones
in Asia. Slash-and-burn cultivation is less and less
possible. A growing proportion of rural people
comprises (a) landless or near-landless labourers,
residual employees if in agriculture and hence
especially vulnerable to seasonal and other fluctuations
in the demand for labour: (b) farmers with individual
claims on land rights, able to sell or mortgage land in
time of stress. Crop-mixes are shifting (with
urbanisation, food aid. and research biases) towards
maize, rice and wheat, with more specific dated water
requirements, and therefore more seasonal vulner
ability. than the older crops and mixed-cropping
systems.
As Africa's person/land ratio gets closer to Asia’s, the
’Africa-damaging’ differences in respect of vulner
ability to seasonal stress should also be reduced. But
the latter reduction requires public spending in
support of the farm sector, in response to the new
factor ratios. Such spending is constrained by urban
bias much more extreme than in Asia; by severe
shortages of funds for recurrent public outlays', and by
foreign and other pressures towards ‘price purist',
expenditure-reducing public-sector policies. Hence
there is rather little spending on the water
management. or even on the improvement of intrarural road systems, that might reduce seasonal
vulnerability in Africa.
Bad seasonal impacts on poor people, like other ‘agro
health’ issues, urgently need research on how to adapt
responses to rapidly rising person/land ratios. What
are the counter-seasonal options in the context of a
continent-wide shift from area-expanding to yield
expanding technology? The latter, in South Asia, has
actually increased the coefficient of variation of yearly
food output at national levels, but this is due to the
concentration of (rising) output in a few nearby areas.
dependent partly on irrigation but partly also on
rainfall, and therefore covariant. Increases in fertiliser
use. and most shifts towards modern seed varieties,
increase ‘worst-case’ output-pcr-year for any given
farm — even if that rather unimportant number, the
coefficient of variation of national output, goes up.
The damage done by an unexpectedly bad season
should therefore be reduced by this sort of researchlinked intensification. But neither the increases, nor
the improved levels of food reserves associated with a
shift to modern varieties, can be achieved without
substantial spending on agricultural research and on
input supply and delivery, in most areas probably
including at least micro-level irrigation systems.
IV
Some Possible Areas of Remedy
I should like to follow up the above remarks with
something which is at best a set of notes towards a
research agenda, that may stimulate others. The
question is: how can one reduce the extent to which
seasonality leads to increases in ultra-poverty? Several
forms of adaptation to seasonal stress, by people
already at risk, are possible.
First, food behaviour could be adapted. In an
unexpectedly bad season, it may become possible for
different groups of poor people to raise their ratios of
consumption to income, of food to consumption, or of
cheap (c.g. reserve-crop root) consumption to food. It
may become possible for the potentially ultra-poor to
escape their fate by adapting the timing of work, or of
meals, or the places of work, to reduce the amount of
calories required and/or to improve the conversion
efficiency of food into work, although experts disagree
about the extent to which individuals differ, over time,
in their metabolic rates per kg — or can adapt their
rates to increase food-to-work conversion efficiency in
times of nutritional stress; how much adaptation is
possible, among whom, for how long, and what
measures might be taken by individuals or societies to
improve benign adaptations to nutritional stress? It
may also be possible to improve the intra-family food
distribution in times of seasonal stress. Some of these
strategies are doubtless adopted by poor people
seeking to cope with bad seasons, but not all people
adopt the best strategies in each bad season; perhaps
some can learn from others, or can be helped by
outside systems to do so.
Second, households in seasonal stress may be able to
respond by adapting their use of factor inputs. Work
timing, duration, type, or search behaviour may be
adaptable between peak and slack seasons, or among
household members in seasons of nutritional stress. If
assets are owned, it may be possible at some cost to
shift probable income from assets into the more
stressful, or less secure, part of the year. Plainly, in
environments where there are no major long-term
trends of change, poor households are likely to learn
such adaptive techniques by themselves — they must,
to survive. But few environments are as static as this,
and indeed policy itself does much to change them,
often in ways that destroy traditionally learned
methods of seasonal coping. Also, many of the poorest
children do not at present survive seasonal stress; and
many of the more adaptable adults either migrate or
enrich themselves enough to reduce its impact, leaving
the burdens to fall on those who remain in the
potentially ultra-poor groups.
A third possible area of adaptation concerns seasonal
migration. Often, seasonal migrants are the poorest
and most oppressed of groups. Yet anti-poverty policy
has seldom made effective contact with them. Further,
Indian experience suggests that seasonal migration is a
major outlet for people — e.g. landless or nearlandless labourers moving from Bihar to the Punjab
for work — who would otherwise be much poorer;
policies that subsidised or otherwise encouraged
migration of labour, instead of mechanisation to
displace labour, could have major beneficial seasonal
effects. Problems of schooling and health for children,
whether they accompany the seasonal migrants or are
left behind, need careful attention, however.
Fourth, it would be worth looking at the possibility of
adapting methods of seasonal financial-cum-land
management. When a really bad year comes along, in
the most difficult seasons, many people are pushed
over into ultra-poverty by being compelled to sell or
mortgage the little land they have. Can alternative and
less onerous methods, at least providing some effective
competition against the small number of local
moneylenders, be found in such circumstances?
Finally, it would be worth asking whether common
property resources, such as access to grazing, water.
thatch grass and fuels, arc — or can be rendered — less
'seasonal' than private property resources. Work done
by Jodha in Rajasthan confirms that common
property resources are a much larger part of income
for the very poor than for the better-off — but that
income from common property has been eroding
rapidly in the last 15 years or so [Jodha 1983]. The
analysis of common property management and
protection is among the many parts of our subject that
needs to take on a seasonal tinge, if the access of very
poor people to basic food requirements in difficult
times is to be safeguarded and improved.
These are admittedly scrappy ‘thoughts of a dry brain
in a dry season’. Perhaps there is an analogy between
seasonal studies and women’s studies. In both cases
the impact and effectiveness of social scientists will be
greatly reduced, if we make a little ghetto for seasonal
studies or women's studies. In the case of seasons, our
entire analysis of the economics, sociology and politics
of agriculture and the rural economy — and of its
relations with the city, about which I have said almost
nothing here — needs to be permeated with an
awareness that impact on the very poor matters most
in the seasons of greatest risk, and is somewhat less
important in the more well-favoured times of the year.
References
Bcngoa. J. M. and G. Donoso. 1974, ’Prevalence of protein
caloric malnutrition. 1963-1973*. PAG Bulletin, vol 4 no 2.
pp 24-35
Chambers. R.. R. Longhurst and A. Pacey (eds), 1981.
Seasonal Dimensions to Rural Poverty, Frances Pinter.
London
7
Edirisinghe, N., and T. Polcman, 1983, ‘Behavioural
thresholds as indicators of perceived dietary adequacy or
inadequacy’, Cornell International Agricultural Economics
Study No 17, Ithaca, NY
8
Lipton. M.. 1983a, ‘Poverty, undernutrition and hunger'.
World Bank Staff Working Paper No 597. Washington DC
— 1983b. ‘Labour and poverty’. World Bank Staff Working
Paper No 616, Washington DC
Greer, J., and E. Thorbccke, forthcoming. ‘Food poverty
profile applied to Kenyan smallholders’. Economic Develop
ment and Cultural Change
— 1983c. ‘Demography and poverty’. World Bank Staff
Working Paper No 623, Washington DC
Jodha, N.. 1983. ‘Market forces and the erosion of common
property resources’. Paper presented at the International
Workshop on Agricultural Markets in the Semi-Arid
Tropics. ICRISAT
— 1985a, ‘Possibilities of reduced dietary energy require
ments and of adaptation to low intakes: implications for
economics and for policy’, World Nutrition Society Conf.,
Brighton (mimeo)
Keller, W. and C. M. Fillmore, 1983, ‘Prevalence of protein
energy malnutrition'. World Health Statistics Quarterly,
vol 36 pp 129-67
— 1985b, ‘Land assets and rural poverty’. World Bank Staff
Working Paper No 744, Washington DC
Kumar, S. K.. 1977. ‘Role of the household economy in
determining child nutrition at low-income levels: A case
study in Kerala', Cornell University Occasional Paper
No 95. Ithaca, NY
Rao, V. Bhanoji. 1981, ‘Measurement of deprivation and
poverty based on the proportion spent on food: an
exploratory exercise’, World Development, vol 9 no 4,
pp 337-53
Women and Seasonality: Coping with Crisis and Calamity
Janice Jiggins
I
Introduction
Over the last few years, a great deal of evidence has
been amassed on the impact of seasonal adversities on
women, children and their families. Attempts have
been made to differentiate the varying impacts on
households and, within households, on women and
children in different income classes and to build
dynamic models of the ‘screws and ratchets’ which
push manageable seasonal stress toward the break
down limits of livelihood systems.
What is attempted here is an exploration of the
contribution of female production, labour and
domestic domain services to the management of inter
annual and intra-annual uncertainty, the steps in the
sequence of deterioration under accumulating stress.
and of the options open to women and their children
through and beyond the point of family disintegration,
when managing seasonalities becomes a matter of
individual physical survival.
The evidence of female mortality and morbidity rates,
from some areas at particular times, suggests that the
wastage of females may be countenanced in times of
acute stress as necessary to the survival of social
systems as a whole, however distressing at the level of
family survival. It establishes the extreme end of a
range of situations in which poor rural men and
women act and react to expected inter-annual and
intra-annual fluctuations, interspersed with shocks
whose advent is always latent but whose timing and
severity is unguessable.
The management of uncertainty is inherent in small
producers’ and labourers’ livelihood systems; not
surprisingly, these are characterised by flexibility, the
maintenance of a range of options to meet expected
fluctuations in resource endowments, entitlements to
food, work and income, climatic variation and the
unreliability of government services. If it is true that
the less flexible the livelihood system, the harder it is to
manage seasonal stress and sudden shock, then it is
important to understand how and what different
members of a household contribute to that flexibility.
Such an exploration leads to consideration of how
members of households assess probabilities and how
they express risk preferences. It has been fashionable,
for example, to assert that small producers prefer to
minimise risk by aiming for inter-annual yield stability
around the minimum necessary to meet subsistence
needs. The concentration on yield stability per se may
be diverting attention from a more dynamic calculus
in which household members complement each
others' contributions to livelihood stability across
seasons by maintaining the capacity to transfer
resources in and out of the sub-systems which together
constitute their livelihood
In some enterprises, one family member might be
happy to make a high risk-high pay off investment if
assured that failure could be covered, or another to
make a high input-low return investment if that return
were deemed essential but could be gained in no other
way. This calculus is likely to changeover time. As in a
commercial business, both risk preferences and
probability assessments are likely to become more
conservative after a run of bad years, as assets and
room for manoeuvre dwindle and as investments
made in the course of a run of good years have to be
paid for out of shrinking revenues.
As households head into the bottom of the cycle, it
becomes a fine run thing for many of them to maintain
the flexibility to ride out the bad years. The need to
concentrate time and effort on essential high inputlow return activities (such as fetching water from
distant river beds in the dry season), may absorb
household resources to the point of no return;
households here must enter into new livelihood
systems closer to the point of destitution, or
disintegrate.
It is because men and women make separate if
complementary contributions to the maintenance of
IDS Bulletin. I9S<>. vol 17 no 3. Institute of Development Studies. Susses
9
livelihood flexibility within the framework of expected
inter-annual and intra-annual uncertainty, that not
only the timing of a sudden shock but the gender of its
victim(s) is important. The death of children from
measles at the beginning of the agricultural season
might provide greater room to manoeuvre to a couple
seeking their daily living from an uncertain and
gender-ascribed wage labour market or, on the other
hand, remove essential labour at a critical moment
from a female household head farming on her own
account. The death of a husband for a relatively welloff woman in a tenant household might lead to her
forced acceptance of the position of unpaid
agricultural worker for her brother-in-law; the death
of the wife, on the other hand, might offer her husband
the opportunity for re-capitalisation of his farming
activities through remarriage and the acquisition of a
second dowry.
The options are various, the strategies complex and, it
seems, as yet we understand very little about how these
operate over time for households in different income
groups or for individual household members. The
following section explores briefly some of the ways in
which women are contributing to the management of
expected seasonal uncertainty and the maintenance of
livelihood flexibility. Sections III and IV attempt a
progression through time in the face of relentless
seasonal adversity.
II Uncertainty and Flexibility
Although neither the timing, distribution nor intensity
of seasonal stresses may be known in advance, their
advent and the range of probable fluctuation are
accepted as normal occurrences by the rural poor.
Among the range of possible responses, seven which
tend to be particular to women are outlined here in
brief.
Switching Tasks and Responsibilities ascribed by
Gender
In many rural societies, specific tasks and areas of
responsibility are ascribed by gender. Where these are
rigid, it might be that households — particularly low
income households — find the management of
seasonalities harder than in societies in which there is
some scope for men and women to take over each
other’s tasks and responsibilities as need and
opportunity arise. Contrast the following two
examples. In an area of Tanzania in which only
women cook and carry water, dry season water
carrying absorbs a great deal of female labour time.
Men welcomed a proposed village water facility
because, they said, ‘Water is a big problem for women.
We can sit here all day waiting for food because there
is no women at home’ [Wiley 1981:58J.
(i)
10
In contrast, a Javanese case study reports greater
scope for a more flexible response to gender-ascribed
tasks and seasonal opportunities; ‘Men, for example,
sometimes stay at home to babysit and cook a meal
while adult women and girls are off harvesting, or
trading at the market’ [White 1985; 132].
In a study of the pastoral Orma along the Tana River
in Kenya, Ensminger (1985) presents data which show
only slight variation in the amount of time spent on or
in the pattern of male and female activities between the
seasons, except that, in the dry season, women do
slightly less work such as cooking and milking and
men spend more time in stock-watering and well
digging. Although young girls may take on some of the
tasks associated with (male) herding, in general — at a
time of maximum nutritional stress — men’s dry
season work increases somewhat whilst women’s
leisure time increases. Asking why there arc ‘relatively
few age/sex cross-overs of labour allocation between
seasons’ (page 14), Ensminger finds that her data do
not satisfactorily support explanations based on
reproductive rationality, differential physiological
efficiencies, social reproduction needs nor redistri
bution.
Indeed, it would seem that it is partly the social
perception of the scope for switching rather than
‘objective’ assessments of capacity or returns which
determines how flexible households can be in
assigning seasonal labour tasks. In a study of labour
market behaviour in South India, Ryan and Ghodake
(1980) attempt to relate the effects of season, sex and
socioeconomic status and speculate that differential
labour market opportunities would support the
economic rationality of skewed intra-household food
distribution toward adult males but, as Schofield
(1974) points out, we simply do not know if this
presumed rationality leads to food being seasonally
distributed independent of the task and sex of the
operator:'.. . are women fed more when weeding and
men when ploughing? In this case, commonsense
would suggest that available food is so distributed to
the workers that the non-work force section bears the
brunt of seasonal variation in food supplies’
[Schofield 1974:26],
Where male and female farming are partially
separated within the household livelihood system, the
answer to the question of the intrahouschold pattern
of income and food distribution in relation to
women’s labour productivity, as Jones (1982) has
demonstrated for a Cameroonian case, may lie in
calculations of the intrahousehold rate of compen
sation rather than market opportunity costs.
Another factor may be the degree to which own
account production is the main livelihood source. One
study in Cajamarcan in the Andes found that in
landless households depending on non-farming
income-generating activities for the major part of their
livelihood, a ‘flexible sexual division of labour [in
agriculture] appears to be required by economic
necessity', whereas in landed households, agriculture
is predominantly a male activity [Deere and de Leal
1982:88],
(ii) Diversifying Household Income Sources
It is common in development studies to see female
income referred to as supplemental and for it to be
subsumed within estimates of household income.
Neither practice seems particularly helpful. For
growing numbers of households headed by women,
women’s earnings form the main cash source; in
households where male and female responsibilities arc
separated, women are obliged by the terms of their
marriage contract to find the cash needed to fulfill
their assigned responsibilities; amongst the poorest
households, women’s earnings may form an equal or
larger share of household income; a greater portion of
the income accruing to women than to men tends to be
spent on household welfare and consumption needs.
For all these reasons, in terms ofseasonal analysis, the
sex of the income-earner and the intra-household
distribution of income and responsibility is thus likely
to be more important than total household income as
an indicator of the household’s capacity to maintain
itself in the face of seasonal adversity.
Women in Rwanda combining farming with child care.
Changing the Intensity and Mix of Multiple
Occupations
There are good records of women manipulating the
intensity of performance and the mix of occupations
associated with their multiple roles in order to cope
with seasonally urgent tasks. In general, it would
appear to be their domestic domain roles which are
squeezed rather than production or income-earning.
though, as one would expect, the balance of net
advantage may be different for women in households
in different income classes [for a Philippines example
see Illo 1985:85-7], For example, surveys among
primary school children in the Mochudi District of
Botswana during the ploughing season showed that
nearly one third of primary school children were
caring for themselves without adult help in the month
of February whilst parents were absent at the lands
[Otaala 1980]. Cooking may be reduced to once a day
or every two days during peak farm labour periods or
staples substituted by snack foods which can be eaten
raw [Bantje 1982a. Table 2; Jiggins 1986]. Ryan and
Ghodake [1980] note for four South Indian villages
that it is the hours women work in the domestic
domain or as unpaid farm family labour which tend to
fluctuate seasonally rather than the hours of waged
work.
(iii)
A number of studies do, in fact, show that women
make careful judgements of the balance of advantage
between, for example, maintaining food stocks and
converting a portion to beer-brewing and selling as the
agricultural season progresses [see Saul 1981 on
sorghum beer-brewing in Upper Volta] or between
allocating their labour to food production and
processing for domestic consumption or to marketing
[see Kebede 1978 for the balance between onset (the
‘false banana’) production and the chircharo system of
trading among the Gurage in Ethiopia],
There is, further, growing evidence of the close
correlation between female income-earning and child
bearing: the higher women’s income, the lower the
number of pregnancies [Evenson 1985:27], The causa!
relationship appears to be mediated through the
monetisation of women’s time. If we have evidence
that changes in agriculture lead to an increase in
women’s time input with no increase in — or even loss
of control over — their income, then we can expect
that the adverse seasonalities associated with maternal
and child health will, in fact, be exacerbated and may
be contributing to the kinds of family breakdown
outlined in Section IV.
11
(iv) Household Gardening
The domain of the household garden provides a
further clement of flexibility in the livelihoods of those
with access to land. Studies from Grenada.
Zimbabwe, West Africa, Jakarta. South East Asia and
Peru emphasise the importance of household gardens
under women’s care as a source of early-maturing
varieties of staples to carry families over the hungry
season till main crops mature, as reserve sources of
plant materials should main crops fail, as conservation
sites for special or preferred varieties and as testing
grounds for new varieties or practices [Brierley 1976;
Callear 1982; Eijnatten 1971, Evers 1981, Ninez 1984.
Stoler 1978]. A study in Kalimantan in Indonesia
recorded an average of over 40 different species of
vegetable, spice and fruit crops in household gardens
[Watson 1985:198]. Local cultigens, semi-wild and
protected wild species, together with small stock and
poultry, may add to the diversity and richness,
constituting a complex biological coping mechanism
responsive to intra-annual and inter-annual climatic
and labour time variations, meeting specific seasonal
end-uses which cannot be provided by field crops.
however abundant [Jiggins 1986].
(v) Food Processing, Preservation and Preparation
The choice of crop mix, plant characteristics and
amount of time devoted to cultivation is not
determined solely by consumption preferences nor are
food purchases determined only by income; they are
intimately associated with the technology available to
women for domestic processing, preservation and
preparation. These technologies in turn may be linked
to the seasonal availability of different types of fuel for
cooking and space heating (Foley et al 1984:34] and the
differential fuels available to women in different
income strata through the seasons [ibid 36]. Vidyarthi
[1984] shows from data for one Indian village, the use
of dung and firewood by women in bullock-owning
households and an increasing reliance on crop
residues by poorer women, who use spiky millet stems
through the end of the Kharif season in November,
then pigeon pea stems through the end of rabi in April
(which give the best sustained heat of all residues), and
then a weed, Ipomeafitulosa, which gives a smoky heat
and must be gathered, cut and dried for a month
before use, and gathered wood. He estimates that
agricultural residues may form around 40 per cent of
all fuels used by poorer women.
Huss-Ashmore details these links carefully for female
headed households in highland Lesotho [HussAshmore 1982:156]. In Mokhotlong the type of fuel
used and the time spent getting it vary according to the
seasonal availability of dung. Slow-cooking protein
sources are not used equally through the year but are
depicted during the cold season when the slow burning
12
compacted dung is available. ‘During the summer the
population relies heavily on wild vegetable protein
sources, which require more time to locate and gather
but which can be rapidly cooked', using the horse and
cattle dung picked upon the high pastures and kindled
with quick-burning resinous and woody shrubs [ibid
157J. It is fuel seasonalities and not crop availability
which determine which foods are eaten and the food
preparation equipment used at different seasons.
Women also attempt to cope with crop seasonalities
through food processing, to extend the storability and
shelf life of perishables, from simple sun-drying of
leaves and vegetables treated with soda ash, to more
elaborate transformations such as those involved in
the making of Kenke and gari (cassava products) in
West Africa or chuno (potato products) in the High
Andes.
(vi) Social Organisation
An apparently growing phenomenon is the formation
of multi-generational, multi-locational networks of
households headed by women. Only some of these are
the result of family breakdown — women may be
choosing to have children without what they perceive
to be the burdens of marriage [Kcrven 1979]. They
appear to be an emergent form of social organisation
designed to spread risk and optimise seasonal
management strategies in areas of high gender-specific
migration, marked seasonality, and marked gender
specific livelihood opportunities [see Kervcn 1979 for
Botswana examples; Phongpaichit 1980 for Thai
examples].
Another strategy in areas where there is a developed
labour market is for women from poor households to
associate in specialist labour gangs to take advantage
of seasonal cropping patterns. They may travel over a
wide area, moving with the season from contract to
contract, with gangs known for their speed and skill
gaining premium rates. In a ten-member Sri Lankan
gang documented in 1979, which moved from the wet
zone to the irrigated dry zone twice a year to carry out
paddy transplanting, six were married women, of
whom two were separated from their husbands
[ESCAP/FAO 1979:28-40]. The four resident hus
bands worked as casual labourers. The other women
lived with their families, of whom only three had even
a tiny plot of high land for cultivation. Their ages
ranged from 26 to 55 years and they worked as casual
estate labourers the rest of the year. Their
transplanting earnings were spent on daily living and
family needs; their own clothes and jewellery;
furniture and pilgrimages. The high preference for
turning their earnings into an easily convertible store
of value under their own control, as a hedge against a
crisis and calamity, has been noted in many studies
[Jiggins 1983].
Yet another mechanism is to develop semi-formalised
women’s groups based on existing forms and
principles of female association. Yet these might not
be as useful as might at first be supposed in the
maintenance of the poorer members’ livelihoods
through seasonal stress. In a study of women’s groups
in Kenya, members were asked to identify those who
were 'famine resistant’ or ‘famine-prone’ i.e. who
would or would not be able to stand even a mild
harvest failure or livestock disease. Famine-proneness
turned out to be associated with illiteracy and
household headship [Muzale and Leonard 1985:19].
Resurveyed after a year of drought, the membership
was found to have dropped to those previously
identified as ‘famine-resistant’. The famine-prone had
left the groups long before the groups suspended
activities due to the drought and were not expected by
those who were left to return.
‘Participation in women's groups at the initial
stages represents a form of long-term investment.
At that stage, the groups do not yield material
benefits for individual use in the family. Joint
welfare funds, friendship, production information
and skills are all the benefits that group
participation is able to produce at the individual
level at the initial stages. Women operating within
small resource margins in a harsh environment are
not likely to be able to undertake this form of
investment on a continuing basis. If the groups’
policies continue to demand contributions well
into periods of environmental stress, poor women
will be excluded’
Ill
Dealing with Relentless Adversity
Given the kind of flexibilities described above, what
gives way as families move into deepening poverty in
the face of relentless adversity, such as several years of
bad harvests? It seems we do not have sufficient
information as yet to write about generalised patterns
of how women adjust (nor of the effects of family
adjustments on women) or to define precisely the
parameters within which they occur. The following
cases from the South Asian region, then, are only
illustrative of the kinds of things which seem likely to
happen.
A study of the sequential responses of deepening
poverty in villages in two areas of Bangladesh, viz.
Comilla and Modhupur. distinguished between
female wage-earning households and those without
female wage-earners and, within the former category,
the position of widowed/divorced/separated women
and married women [Begum 1985:221-41], At some
point in a run of bad harvest years, in smallholder
households in which women did not work for wages,
males sought or held non-agricultural wage jobs which
at a pinch could compensate for loss of farm earnings.
In smallholder households where women took wage
work, men had no such alternative job and began to
‘. .. lease out and perhaps sell land. They may also
sell productive assets (e.g. bullocks) or consume
productive inputs (e.g. seed). They may place male
children in permanent jobs where they receive food
and shelter. Finally, women may perform wage
labour. The involvement of rural women in wage
labour seems to be the last step in a series of family
adjustments to economic crises that is taken only
when the alternative is the effective breakdown of
the family unit’ [7Z>trf:232].
Yet another mechanism — though possibly the
reference is eccentric — is the practice of what might
be termed ‘seasonal polygamy’: men contracting
marriage with additional wives at the beginnmgof the
crop season and divorcing them again afterwards, in
order to optimise household labour resources when
they are needed and to minimise the post-harvest draw
down of household food stocks fBanlje 1982a: 16].
Households that had female wage earners also were
more dependent on children’s earnings. In particular,
the higher percentage of labour participation of
female children from female wage-earning households
was found to reflect their acute poverty [/6t</:233-4].
(vii) Gift-Giving
Hidden within rural life is the special advantage that
single, widowed and divorced and separated women
may have to solicit and accept gifts from men in a
relationship which falls short of prostitution in many
respects but which women may skillfully exploit as a
gender-specific coping strategy, even in societies in
which propriety deems it a protective rather than
exploitative relationship. Documentary evidence,
unsurprisingly, is meagre. One example from
Tanzania records a women’s comment: ‘We just look
this way and that wav for help. You see, 1 am a woman'
[Bantje 1982b:7|.
There is an indication that the ability to support
livelihoods through gleaning is dependent on the
characteristics of the rice varieties grown. Among a
number of differences between survey sites, the study
pointed to the importance of the rice varieties grown
as an index of the availability to women of harvesting
wages, gleaning and post-harvest threshing
employment.
‘The long strawed broadcast anian rice grown in
Comilla was less uniform in length. Consequently.
some crops remained unharvested in the fields. On
all land but that belonging to the poorest
households, it was a prerogative of the women and
children from poor landless households to glean
13
the fields. They would then obtain access to a
neighbour’s dheki to dchusk the rice' [/W</:235-6].
Women wage-earners from landless households were
found to take almost a third of their earnings in the
form of gleaning, begging and charity. There is some
indication from a Sri Lankan study that petty thieving
in cash or kind forms another kind of supplemental
income for women in landless households under
stress, particularly for those (not the poorest) who still
have access to small scale consumption credit from
traders or neighbours and who are pressed by their
creditors to repay at times of seasonal stress [Rissecuw
1980:166].
The implication of the Bangladesh case, that whatever
women’s personal earnings or assets, these are
consumed before the point of family breakdown, is
also indicated by data from a case study of workers in
the plantation sector of Sri Lanka. Women’s earnings
are ‘eaten away by other people’, their jewellery
pawned or sold by their menfolk to cover debts and
raise new credit, and their food intake reduced
disproportionately as debt repayments cut into
current income [Kurian 1981:134],
Another Bangladesh case illustrates how a woman
from a poor household may be shuttled back and forth
between her marital and natal home as seasonal crisis
leads into greater poverty [Nath 1979], Her parents are
keen to marry her off, to relieve what is seen as a
consumption burden but, similarly, suitors, poor
themselves, are reluctant to take a wife without a
dowry in compensation. Unable to pay the full dowry
at one go, the bride is sent home whenever dowry
payments fail — or the husband might demand more
as his own problems worsen. The birth of a daughter
or economic crisis in the natal or marital home then
leaves the wife as an unwelcome presence in either
household, neither accepting responsibility, until she
finds herself abandoned by both.
Food aid disbursements and Food for Work (FFW)
schemes offer seasonal relief for some women who are
approaching or who are beyond the point of family
breakdown. Studies of the Employment Guarantee
Scheme in Maharashtra, India [Institute of Social
Studies 1979] and the Food for Work programme in
Bangladesh [World Food Programme 1979, Rahman
Khan 1979] record unexpectedly high proportions of
women turning up for work. Nearly half of all the
women surveyed in Bangladesh FFW schemes were
found to be the main income earners for their families
and of these, more than two thirds were widowed,
separated or divorced [WFP 1979].
IV
Desperate Measures
Crushed by poverty to the point where there is no
14
flexibility left for surviving seasonal stresses or faced
by sudden disaster, a man may decide to push his wife
and children out of the house or to walk out on them.
Greenough infers from the high percentage of adult
women (56 per cent) applying for relief and the fact
that a quarter of all adult applicants were living away
from their spouses in a study of more than 3,000 relief
recipients in Bengal during the 1943 famine, that the
deliberate separation of spouses is a common response
to crisis. He further quotes a survey of street-dwellers
in Calcutta during the 1943 famine which similarly
suggests that ‘the exclusion of women from domestic
subsistence’ was the major direct cause of their arrival
in Calcutta [Greenough n.d.:5; Greenough 1982]. The
turning points in six of the case histories he presents
are summarised in Table 1.
Beyond the point of family breakdown caused by
deepening poverty and sudden shocks such as the
death of a husband, or flood, there are a number of last
desperate measures women may take — or be forced
into taking — to save themselves and their children.
Briefly, they might be listed as follows:
(i) migration, often involuntary, after they have been
pushed out of the marital or natal house or the
husband has abandoned the family [Scott 1984:50;
Obbo 1980; Jahan 1979; Rahaman 1981]. A large
number of involuntary women migrants turn to
begging and vagrancy. Jahan [1979:270] remarks of
the Bangladesh situation: ‘The basic cause of [female]
vagrancy is poverty, destitution brought on by the
death/disability of male guardians or crop failure in
densely populated areas.’
(ii) either just before or shortly after family
breakdown, efforts might be made to place (especially
male) children in others’ households where they will
work in return for food [Rahman Khan 1979] or they
are left outside an orphanage, or they are bought and
sold in return for food, or, in worst case situations,
simply abandoned [Rahaman 1981:136].
(iii) changes in the character and intensity of
gathering or cultivation of wild and semi-wild
foodstuffs, preferred species giving way to famine
foods which become a major or even the only food
source [Rahaman 1981]. Anecdotal evidence from
famine relief workers suggests that often it is women
who preserve knowledge of the whereabouts and
preparation of these foodstuffs.
(iv) failing all else, prostitution, for adult women and
female children, may be the last resort. A study of 273
prostitutes in Dhaka [Jahan 1979:270-4] and the case
material from Bengal adduced by Greenough (1982)
suggest that it is impoverishment, made unsupportable
by flood or famine, and the loss of male guardian or
Tabic I
The Fate of Women during the 1943-44 Bengal Famine
Original
Household
Cases
A.
1. Sankari
Addy
Hindu
Status
1 acre
smallholder
Recently
married
(18 year)
Main
Livelihood
Betel
vines
Distress
Crisis
Debt
Famine
B.
4. Sinhabala
Mandal
Hindu
C.
5. Puntibala
Sing
6. Angurbala
Sing
acre owned
by husband
Household of
self, daughter,
husband, his
elder brother/
wife/6 child
ren. father-inlaw
1. Hut
2. Utensils
3. Labour
4. Everything
but cloth
ing.
Mother died
when she
was young,
father soon
after her
own marriage.
Only son
died after 10
weeks of
famine
Husband divorced her. then abandoned
her to join the army Wandered from
free kitchen to free kitchen.
1 Bullocks.
roof sheets.
windows
and doors;
day labour.
2. utensils,
ornaments.
furniture.
3. Mongaged
last room
10 years old
eldest child
after weeks
eating only
boiled
vegetables.
Within 3
days. 2 funher
children.
Husband unable to bear the calamity
and left She was collected by her mother
and brought back to her father’s village.
Agriculture
2-room hut.
cowshed.
kitchen.
2 bullocks
Some agri
cultural tools.
Crop
Failure
Day
labouring
Cow
Famine
Brass and
bell-metal
utensils.
Cow
Father-in-law
after eating
inedible food.
Husband, of
malaria, after
returning
from search
for food. One
nephew.
Ate wild vegetables. Father claimed her
but made her sell the '/, acre in return
for a room at his house. Some years later.
married off her daughter and was joined
by her son-in-law
Flood
All
possessions
Husband.
father, step
mother. by
drowning.
Protected by wealthy village man for
4 months Returned to protection of
neighbour who was poor. Ate wild
foodstuffs. Left to seek food. Begged at
office of a landlord. Given food, shelter.
a room by the market. Violated Began
life as prostitute under landlord's
protection. Eventually formed own
brothel
Mother and
sister, when
father’s house
swept away
Husband,
when own
house swept
away.
Returned to father. Lived on charity/
government relief For 4 months under
protection of wealthy man. Fled before
raped Contacted former female villager
(who was already a prostitute) for
assistance Fell into operator’s hands.
Father given agricultural work far away.
After 5 years, opened own brothel.
Crippled
father,
mother, step
mother. self,
husband
Father a
share-cropper
Livelihoods
Driven out to beg for food. Lived on gruel
at free kitchen for 1 month. Left to find
more food. Fainted on highway. Taken
into hospital. Husband remained on farm
to tend betel vines.
Flood
Crop
Failure
Farmer. Welloff for first
12 years of
marriage
Alternative
Deaths
Famine
2. Aifalijan
Moslem
3. No name
Sales
Agriculture
lOORs
June.
July
August
Cyclone.
Father’s
house
destroyed.
Later
found
husband's
house
destroyed.
Notes: A. Wives deserted by or pushed out by husbands.
B. Bctter-ofT wife able to survive disaster.
C. Wives who lost everything and ended up in prostitution
Source; Constructed from case notes presented in P. R. Grccnough; ‘Some notes on peasant prostitutes recruited in times of famine'. Wid notes. Mucia Wid
Network. Land Tenure Centre. University of Wisconsin. Madison, n d.. pp4-7
15
One feature which stands out is the resilience of
female-headed household networks to seasonal stress
and calamity; far from being among the ’most
vulnerable’, more critical study of the advantages of
their organisational and economic flexibility may
show that they arc the ’survivors’. In this light, it may
be that the prevalence of such networks in subSaharan Africa is a very rational and positive response
to harsh and prolonged environmental crisis.
spouse (through death, divorce or desertion), which
are the main causes leading women into involuntary
prostitution.
A Reconsideration of Seasonal Uncertainty
and Calamity
The largely descriptive information presented here
perhaps allows us to make a preliminary sketch of the
role women play in the maintenance of livelihood in
the face of seasonal uncertainty and calamity, to begin
to frame more discerning questions concerning risk
preferences and probability assessments, and to look
again at the valuation of women’s labour time.
The Table also suggests that it might be possible to
construct a matrix of male and female risk preferences
and probability assessments, for households in
different social classes and at various stages of
decision-making, in the sequence from crisis to
calamity.
In Table 2, a very simple summary is attempted of the
particularly female options open for the maintenance
of livelihood in the face of seasonal crisis and calamity,
for two categories of poor households, landed and
landless. It is fairly heroic, ignoring all regional and
continental differences in the social organisation of
production and gender relations. Nonetheless, it
suggests a number of patterns which might turn out to
be general.
Finally, it suggests that a good deal more thought has
to be given to the valuation of female labour time. Not
only is it not constant along the domestic domain —
public domain continuum nor in relation to the value
of male labour time, but it would seem on the face of it
to fluctuate in relation to the importance of women's
livelihood contribution through the sequence of crisis
to calamity.
Table 2
Seasonal Crisis and Calamity: An illustration of female options
Seasonal Crisis
Landed
Extent to
Calamity
Landless
Landed
Landless
Yes
Yes
which:
Male/female tasks and
responsibilities can be
switched
Only under real pressure
Yes
Domestic domain tasks
can be squeezed
Only under real pressure
Yes
Female income-earning is
possible
Moneylcnding; food pro
cessing and trading; petty
manufacturing; wage
labour less common
Female production is
possible
Yes. at the cost of family
welfare, especially child
care
Yes. to a point where (male)
children are placed elsewhere
or children arc sold or
abandoned
Food processing and
trading; wage labour
common/frequent but not
always available
via loans, mortgages, sale
of assets
via begging, prostitution and
FFW
Fields; gardens, ponds;
poultry; small stock; trees;
cows
Trees; small stock, cows;
CPR; gleaning
Garden species may be
less drought-prone, etc.
Gathering of famine foods
Greater pressure on CPR
Gathering of famine foods
Female social organisation
gives returns
FHH Networks: positive.
Semi-formal/formal
groups: positive
Labour gangs: positive
FHH networks: children
of both sexes can be
protected
Brothel-keeping
Female assets can be
disposed of (jewellery,
pots)
Last resort
Common, frequent
More, higher value
Few. low value
Provision of company or
sexual favours in return
for gifts is socially
sanctioned
FHH only
Accepted as sometimes
necessary
Protection by male kin.
Remarriage (if still young)
Prostitution FHH
Networks may exploit to
survive
Prostitution
16
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behaviour in rural villages of South India: effects of season,
sex and socioeconomic status’. Progress Report Economics
Program 15. 1CR1SAT. Andhra Pradesh. August
Saul. M.. 1981. ‘Beer, sorghum and women: production for
the market in Upper Volta’. Africa, vol 51 no 3
18
Schofield, S . 1974. ‘Seasonal factors affecting nutrition in
different age groups and especially preschool children’.
Journal of Development Studies, vol II no 1. October.
pp 22-40
Scott. G.. 1984. ‘Women and human settlement’. CUSO
Journal. Women in Development, pp 49-52
Stoler. A.. 1978. ‘Gardenuse and household economy and
future development’. Culture and Agriculture. Bulletin of
the Agricultural Study Group on Agrarian Systems.
5. pp 1-8
Vidyarthi. V.. 1984. ‘Energy and the poor in an Indian
village’. World Development, vol 12 no 8. pp 821-36
Watson. G. A.. 1985. ‘Women's role in the improvement of
rice farming systems in coastal swamplands’, in IRR1.
Women in Rice Farming. Gower. Aidershot, pp 187-208
While. B.. 1985. ‘Women and the modernisation of rice agri
culture: some general issues and a Javanese case study’, in
IRR1. Women in Rice Farming. Gower. Aidershot.
pp 119-148
Wily. L.. 1981. ‘Women and Development, a case study of
ten Tanzanian villages, Arusha', a report prepared for the
Arusha Planning and Village development Project. Arusha.
Tanzania. March
World Food Programme. 1979, ‘Bangladesh: National relief
works programme for land and waler development'.
WFP/CFA 8/8 Add 5, Rome
Food Shortages and Seasonality in WoDaaBe Communities in Niger
Cynthia White
Introduction
This article deals with a Fulani group, the WoDaaBe,
in central Niger and is based on fieldwork done
between September 1979 and April 1983.1
The WoDaaBe live in a part of the Sahel with low
annual rainfall (200-300mm) and high absolute and
relative seasonality. Rainfall distribution is extremely
variable in time and space. There are four main
seasons: a cold dry season (November to January), a
hot dry season (February to April), a transition season
as erratic rainfall begins (May to July), and a hot rainy
season (August to October).
The WoDaaBe do not cultivate. They raise cattle
primarily and have some sheep and goats. Donkeys
and male camels are used for transport of baggage and
people. The WoDaaBe live in rudimentary camps,
which they move frequently in search of pasture and
water for the animals. In the dry season they use
permanent deep wells for watering the herds, or
shallow wells that arc re-dug by hand each year. At
this time of year, camps are moved every few weeks.1
1 Quantitative data on labour use and household budgets were
collected from November 1980 to September 1982 on a sample of 19
families forming 16 production units. The small size of the sample
was imposed by the difficulties involved in collecting accurate
longitudinal data amongst extremely mobile and scattered
households at long distances from each other, and was compensated
for by the collection of less detailed data and qualitative work done
on a much wider range of WoDaaBe groups in different parts of
Niger’s pastoral zone.
The detailed quantitative data were collected twice weekly by four
WoDaaBe field assistants Because there arc no WoDaaBe who
have been to school, the assistants recorded data in tifinar, the
phonetic script used by the Twareg (the other nomadic pastoral
group in the area) and were taught to write numbers. Each member
of each household was asked about all of his/her activities during
the preceding three or four days. Everything entering or leaving the
household through sale, purchase, loan, barter or gift was recorded.
including prices, quantities, age and condition of animals, and the
market used. In the camps 1 went over each of the data sheets with
the enumerators, clarifying questions, and cross-checked infor
mation by observation and discussions. Full research results are
written up by While in Swift (cd) 1984:292-430; 462-529.
In the rainy season however, the WoDaaBe move
every few days as rainfall moves north and they try to
keep up with a northward advancing front of high
quality green grass. The spatial distribution of rainfall,
and hence pasture, is scattered and unpredictable.
Animals can drink at surface water pools at this time.
Production is organised at the household level. Herds
are managed by individual households and labour
comes from within the household. There is no
dependent class.
Seasonal Work Patterns
Pasturing and watering are the two most time
consuming tasks in WoDaaBe herd management,
although there are many other less demanding jobs to
be done. Figure 1 shows how the total labour
allocation of adult WoDaaBe men to livestock tasks
stays high and quite constant throughout the year,
varying around 5 hours per adult man a day; there is a
peak of 6.5 to 7 man hours a day in the transition
period between the hot season and the rains, between
May and July in both survey years, and a low point of
about 3.5 man hours a day in the immediate post-rains
period in October. The dry season is a time of
prolonged high work hours. Adult men rarely work
less than five hours a day at herding from December
until the rains are well under way in the following July.
Pasturing and watering alternate with each other as
the main activity, with the emphasis shifting from one
to the other according to the season; watering is clearly
much more energy-demanding than pasturing how
ever, and is at its peak at a time when food is often
scarce in WoDaaBe camps. Pasturing work, while less
arduous, nevertheless requires a continuous presence
and considerable skill and knowledge.
An interesting point is the peak in livestock work at
the start of the rains. This is a critical time for the
health and long term well-being of the animals. The
WoDaaBe supervise them carefully to make sure that
they graze the proper mixture of different vegetation
IDS Bulletin, 1986, vol 17 no 3. Institute of Development Studies, Sussex
19
Figure I
Seasonal distribution of work devoted to all livestock
tasks by WoDaaBe men aged 15 to 40 years
the dry season. Average person hours spent per day
watering animals in the dry season was even higher in
the 6-14 year age group than for adult men. Girls help
with a wider variety of tasks, in particular fetching
domestic water, which drops in the wet season and
rises in the dry season.
Figure 2
Seasonal distribution of domestic labour by
WoDaaBe women aged 15-40 years
types and pasture areas to ensure rapid recovery from
the dry season. This is crucial for the animals to get the
maximum benefit from the short wet season green
pasture. The transition season is also a time when
some plant species are at a toxic stage of the vegetative
cycle. Animals must be watched carefully as whole
herds have been known to be wiped out by bloat when
they have grazed toxic growth.
The peaking of most cattle calving just before or in the
early rains means that there is more work then looking
after the young calves at their most vulnerable
moment.
Figure 3
Seasonal distribution of time spent by WoDaaBe
children on all productive tasks
Women help men with pasturing and watering and
have other regular tasks, such as milking and moving
camp, which continue throughout the year. Milking
labour drops off in the dry season when the animals
are producing little milk. Striking and pitching camp
peak in the rainy season when camps are moving most
frequently. Women’s main labour activities however
are pounding and cooking cereals and fetching
domestic water (Figure 2). Both are most time
consuming in the dry season.
Camps are up to 20 km from the wells in the dry season
and women spend long hours collecting water and
helping with watering. At the height of the dry season
they do not return to their camps from the wells until
the evening when they have to pound cerealsand cook.
Because animals’ milk production decreases as the dry
season progresses, households must use greater
quantities of cereals al this time.
Children make an important labour contribution,
particularly in the transition and dry seasons (Figure
3). Boys spend most of their time watering throughout
20
M
A M J
J
Tronnlion
A
SONO
Rom*
Cold
1981
J
F
M A M J
JAS
Hot
Tronlihon
Roim
1982
Although labour inputs are quite high throughout the
year, dry season labour is far more arduous. Well
digging and cleaning, watering animals and walking
long distances to wells in extreme heat contribute to
stress at a time when both food and water are scarce.
Drawing water from wells and lifting it to watering
troughs is back-breaking work. In terms of energy
Table I
Milk available (o WoDaaBe households in different seasons
Milk production
(litres/lactating
cow)
Milk consumption
(litres/person)
August 1980
(rains)
November 1980
(cold)
February 1981
(hot)
May 1981
(transition)
September 1981
(rains)
2.35
1.35
0.64
0
n.a.
n.a.
1.37
0.66
0.37
2.43
requirements, it cannot be compared to wet season
pasturing labour, which, although time-consuming,
requires more knowledge than strength.
Dry Season Food Supplies: Cattle Sales
and Cereal Prices
High dry season labour demands coincide with
household food shortages. As the grass dries out after
the end of the rainy season, its protein content and
nutritional quality decline. Grass is most scarce
around water points and this, combined with the long
distances most animals must walk to wells, reduces
milk production (Table 1). Households must
increasingly supplement their diets with cereals as the
dry season progresses. Cereal prices, however, are
rising at this time (Figure 4).
Figure 4
Mean monthly cereal prices paid by WoDaaBe sample
households
The WoDaaBe’s only source ofcash with which to buy
cereals is the sale of their animals, which are in
particularly poor condition in the dry season and fetch
low prices in the market. Poor families with small
herds and therefore inadequate milk supplies are most
dependent on dry season sales of animals in poor
condition in order to buy expensive cereals. Figure 5
shows that dependence on cereals rises steeply in the
dry season.
An analysis of all cattle sales in a sample of 14
WoDaaBe households over a period of just under two
years (from November 1980 to September 1982)
indicates that sales of very young males and
reproductive females were occuring, with a peak in
sales in the dry hot season. Calf mortality is high in the
first year and drops substantially thereafter. The value
of animals, particularly males, rises sharply with rapid
weight increases over the first few years of their life
and reaches a maximum at about five years for males.
Because of the low marginal cost of herding additional
animals, and the absence of economic cost to the
herder for the use of grazing land, it is clearly in the
herder’s interest to hold onto young male animals
until they have achieved a substantial part at least of
their maximum value. As females provide milk and the
future reproduction of the herd, any sales of
productive females before they approach the end of
their reproductive years seriously jeopardises the
continued production of the herd.
Table 2 compares a computer simulation of the
optimal age/sex distribution of sales with actual sales
in 1981-82, and shows that a high percentage of males
are being sold before they are five years old. Even
more serious is the large number of sales of
reproductive females (26 per cent of all cattle sales).
This pattern of sales is the clearest indicator of a
downward spiral of poverty, in which household herds
are too small to provide for household consumption.
Inadequate milk supplies mean a greater dependence
on cereals. The needs to obtain cash to buy cereals
necessitates further animal sales. Once old femalesand
adult males have been sold, increasingly young males
must be sold to meet cash needs. Herders are then not
only losing the potential economic benefit of the
community
^77
;71-,
HEALTH C'.’.L
.Fits, Hoot. St. Matks Read,
Bangalore - 560 GOT.
2!
Figure 5
Net monthly cereal inflows to WoDaaBe households
and they have grown a lot more, there is an important
saving, both in terms of numbers of animals and value
per animal.
The only way the WoDaaBe have of reducing dry
season cereal consumption is to send household
members away at this time on migrant labour.
Increasing numbers of WoDaaBe arc leaving their
camps in the dry season to go to Nigeria and other
countries, where men work as watchmen or sell
traditional medicines and women earn money
braiding hair or mending calabashes. Prostitution is
not mentioned openly, but there is some evidence that
it takes place when women are well away from their
communities.
animals' weight gain, but. also, a larger number of
young animals must be sold to buy the same amount of
cereals. When the sale of young females begins, the
milk supplies of the household herd are further
reduced, and the vicious circle is completed.
The dry and transition seasons are crucial to this
process. Milk supplies are lowest in the dry season.
and the need for cereals is highest at this time. Cereal
prices are high and the condition of animals is poor, so
a larger number must be sold to obtain the necessary
cash to buy cereals. If household cereal requirements
can be reduced in the dry season, allowing a few more
animals to be held in the herd until the following rainy
season when their condition improves considerably
Detailed household budget studies show that the
WoDaaBe were not able to earn enough money to
return to the camps with savings. They could barely
cover their subsistence costs while they were away and
sometimes contracted debts for transportation. Their
absence however reduces cereal requirements in the
camp, and reduces the need to sell animals in the dry
season. In the sample households, average direct
savings attributable to cereal consumption foregone
as a result of the absence of migrant labourers were
equivalent to the value of a one or two year old male or
female calf. But as the labour graphs show, the dry
season is the time of peak labour demands, and the
absence of migrants aggravates dry season stress on
the household members who stay behind.
Anthropometric data collected by Louis Loutan on 54
WoDaaBe families between August 1980 and
September 1981 (a sample that overlapped with my
own) show the effects of this dry season stress
Table 2
Age-sex structure of cattle sold by WoDaaBe sample compared to optimal sales from simulation
Females
Males
age
(years)
optimal
sales
(%)
sample
sales
(%)
age
(years)
optimal
sales
(%)
sample
sales
(%)
<3
18
27
12
32
9
11
<4
4-9
>9
—
—
43
19
7
22
57
52
(65)
43
48
(59)
3-5
>5
(n)
(Figure 6). Between February and May 1981, the mean
weight loss was 5.3 per cent of body weight for men,
and 4.6 per cent for women. Of the sample of 55 men,
three lost 14 per cent of their body weight. Although
women lose less weight than men, they recuperate less
rapidly during the rainy season [Loutan and Lamotte
1984:946],
Figure 6
Seasonal changes in the mean weight of adult
WoDaaBe men and women
important impact on a household’s independence and
productive capacity. This is especially true in the dry
season.
All of these factors demonstrate that, in contrast to
agricultural societies, it is the dry season and the
transition between the dry and rainy seasons that is the
most difficult time of year for WoDaaBe pastoralists.
It is important to note that although labour demands
drop slightly in the short rainy season, they remain
quite high throughout the year for all age and sex
categories. There is no real slack season when
alternative work can be done outside the pastoral
economy without affecting pastoral productivity.
Figure 7
Weight gain in 32 WoDaaBe children ages 1 to 5 years
by trimester
A more sensitive measure of the fluctuations in
nutritional status during the year is obtained by
calculating the gains in weight of children between one
and five years at intervals of three months (Figure 7).
The sample's average yearly gain of 2.4 kg is
comparable to standard values, but the measurements
again point to the dry season as a time of stress, when
under fives not only stop gaining weight, but actually
suffer weight loss [Loutan and Lamotte 1984],
Data from the same survey show that there was no
significant seasonal variation in the overall number of
diseases. However the rate of incapacitation due to
illness did vary across the year. As Figure 8 shows, the
rate of incapacitation peaked in the dry season when
45 per cent of people of work age (12 years and older)
were confined to bed at least once [Loutan 1982:84].
Because of full labour force participation and the year
round necessity of constant herd surveillance to avoid
animal loss, any incapacitating disease will have an
But this is only part of the picture. Seasonality,
through a coincidence of stress factors in the dry and
transitions seasons, clearly does reinforce poverty
among the WoDaaBe. It is in the dry season that they
are obliged to break into their capital case, directly
reducing future food availability and productive
capacity, it is important to note that in fully pastoral
societies, the loss of the reproductive elements of the
herd through either sales or death, not only diminishes
short term food availability (milk) but also reduces
long term food sources as well as the reproduction of
assets essential to production. Animal loss beyond the
threshold at which the herd can reproduce itself is
equivalent to the sale of land for agriculturalists. It has
an irreversible effect on production, and recovery
requires substantial capital inputs to which the
WoDaaBe do not have access.
23
Figure S
Seasonal variation in the prevalence of the four
commonest illnesses among the WoDaaBe (per cent of
illness events in preceding 3 months)
Seasonality and Poverty
their greater commercial value. Because there are now
so many poor WoDaaBe looking for animals to herd,
they can no longer negotiate the terms on which this
work is done. Although the herder gets some milk for
his labour, he still has to rely on sales from his own
inadequate herd for cash. Furthermore, small herds
and consequent migrant labour and herding outsiders’
animals make it difficult for the WoDaaBe to use the
full range of their normal risk aversion strategies (such
as mobility, herd splitting, animal loans, the use of
traditional rather than public diesel pump wells).
Labour shortages caused by food shortages impose
detrimental labour short-cuts. And there is clear
evidence that keeping animals as a supplementary
investment, rather than for subsistence, and having
them herded by people who do not own them, results
in harmful herd management practices and resource
use, reduced overall productivity of the national herd.
and increasing poverty among pastoralists [White
1984:512-18].
Although seasonal stress is crucial, its impact does not
in itself create the downward spiral of sales of very
young males and reproductive females. Dry season
food shortages requiring many animal sales are not
environmentally determined. They are in fact a recent
phenomenon. Dupire's work on the WoDaaBe of the
same area in the 1950s and 1960s [Dupire 1962a,
1962b, 1962c] demonstrates that household herds
were sufficient for year round subsistence. In the dry
season, reduced milk yields per animal were better
offset by a larger number of animals per household
herd. There was more milk both for consumption and
to obtain cereals through barter. Even non-breeding
animals were sold rarely, and primarily to obtain cash
for taxes.
Large-scale animal loss also affects the redistributive
system that counters seasonal food shortages.
Households with temporary milk shortages are loaned
milk cows for a season by others with adequate milk
supplies. Other forms of animal loans, especially the
loan of a female until she has produced three calves
which then belong to the borrower, help households
that have lost animals through disease or other
misfortune to rebuild a minimum herd. There is a
strong obligation for richer households to provide
animals for poorer, and for the group not to allow an
individual household's herd to fall below subsistence
level. However, this system of collective security can
only operate if the group’s total animal resources are
sufficient.
However, the WoDaaBe suffered important losses of
animals in the drought of the early 1970s, and since
1974 households have not been able to reconstitute
herds that arc viable for year round subsistence. They
arc now obliged to resort to migrant labour or herding
animals belonging to outside investors as stop-gap
measures in order to survive. Neither of these
strategies, however, permit herd reconstitution.
Salaries from migrant labour barely cover the
subsistence of the migrants themselves and cannot
contribute to that of the rest of the family left behind.
much less provide money for animal purchases.
A particularly bad drought year has therefore created
the conditions in which annual dry seasons are now
surmounted only with great difficulty. But once again
this is only a partial picture. There have always been
times of substantial animal loss in the Sahel through
drought or disease. Large-scale irreversible animal
loss is no more environmentally determined than
annual food shortages. The long term evolution of
political and economic conditions is such that the
WoDaaBe are marginal to the political process in
Niger. In this they are similar to nomadic pastoral
peoples in other parts of the world:
Neither is the herding of animals belonging to non
pastoralists a solution for the WoDaaBe. Traditionally,
compensation for this labour was paid in animals and
gradually permitted poor families to obtain a herd.
Now the WoDaabe get nothing from the owners but
the milk of the animals they are tending. However,
investors tend to have a large proportion of males for
Many factors have contributed to make the WoDaaBe
economy more vulnerable: the colonial conquest, the
imposition of cash taxes, an increased dependence on
the market, and the greater political weight of
agriculturalists. Important to this process has been the
expansion of areas cultivated by farmers. The
extension of agriculture was initially a response to
24
pressure lo produce cash crops through the imposition
of cash taxes by colonial governments, and continued
as increased cash needs, reduced soil fertility,
abandoning fallow, land sales, and population
pressure pushed agriculturalists north into increasingly
marginal areas beyond the normal ecological limit to
rainfed cultivation [Watts 1983]. This northward
movement of agriculture reduced pastoralists’ precious
dry season forage reserves and drought fall-back
zones, making pastoralism more vulnerable to
drought.
Before 1974 the WoDaaBe were able to recover from
large-scale animal losses by resorting to various
alternatives. For example after the 1890 rinderpest
epidemic, when the WoDaaBe probably suffered even
greater losses than in the 1968-73 drought, they were
able to rebuild herds primarily through agriculture
and gathering wild plants. They were able lo subsist
and invest surpluses in animals until they had become
fully pastoral again in about 10 to 15 years. Because of
the extension of agriculture, the WoDaaBe have been
gradually pushed north into more arid zones, and in
1974 they did not have access to arable land, or to the
plants they had been able to gather in the past. Nor did
they have any alternative forms of employment. Niger
has no industry to speak of and the WoDaaBe do not
have marketable skills. In 1983, nearly 10 years after
the preceding drought, herds were being depicted
rather than reconstituted.
While it is important to be aware of the combination
of factors that create dry season hardship, the
overwhelming difficulty of this period is merely a
symptom of other more important factors affecting
the WoDaaBe economy.
At the time of the February 1985 Seasonality
workshop the WoDaaBe’s remaining animals were
dying because of the failure of the 1984 rains. A year
later, in February 1986. most have no animals or other
resources and are dependent on sporadic government
grain distributions that arc insufficient for subsistence.
There have been no changes in government policy that
make their present prospects anything but dismal.
The policy implications of this scenario are clear.
Minimum viable herds at the household level must be
built up if pastoralists — 17 per cent of Niger’s
population — are not going to be a continuing drain
on limited national resources. A viable herd allows
families to support themselves and make optimum use
of fluctuating resources that can be used for little else.
A viable pastoral sector, based on herder-owned
animals, contributes to the domestic demand for meat
and provides exports for a country with few sources of
foreign exchange.
Given the large sums of money that arc being invested
by the government and donors in short term stop-gap
measures that do nothing to improve the long term
situation, or on schemes that will not operate if
herders themselves do not have viable herds, the
process of herd reconstitution could well be begun
through outright grants (animals arc available for
purchase in the markets). Subsequently there should
be a credit scheme by which females arc bought and
loaned to needy families for several calvings, and are
then either loaned to another family or sold to repay
the initial debt. This is a system that has proved to be
effective, particularly among WoDaaBe who
scrupulously respect the terms of this arrangement
based on a traditional system that has important social
and economic implications for them.
To speed the process of herd reconstitution and to
improve its longer term effectiveness, the impact of
dry season decapitalisation can be countered by a
short-term cereal credit scheme by which cereals are
bought at low post-harvest prices and then sold at cost
in the dry season when cereal needs and prices are
much higher, and animals are in poor condition. By
reducing dry season animal sales this has an important
impact on household economies.
All of these interventions and other related measures
can best be implemented through an institutional
framework whereby herders are organised in
associations that give them more bargaining power in
the political process.2
To counter the impact of large-scale animal loss in bad
years, a famine early warning system, including
measures lo reduce the collapse of livestock prices and
simultaneous cereal price increases, must be imple
mented [e.g. see Swift 1985].
References
Duptre, M., 1962a. Peuls Nomades: Etude Descriptive des
WoDaaBe dtt Sahel Nigerien, Travaux et Memoires 64.
Instiliit d’Ethnologic, Paris
— 1962b. ‘Trade and markets in the economy of the nomadic
Fulani of Niger (Bororo)', in P Bohanan and G. Dalton
(eds), Markets in Africa. Northwestern University Press
pp 335-6
— 1962c, ’Les facteurs humains de I'economie pastorale'.
Etudes Nigcriennes 6. Institut de Recherches en Sciences
Humaines, Niamey (reprinted 1972)
Loutan, L.. 1982. Nutrition el Same cite: un Groupedeleveurs
WoDaaBe(Bororo) du Niger. Project Gestion des Paturages.
MDR/USA1D. Tahoua. Niger
For a more detailed development of these ideas see Swift and
Maliki 1982. I9S4. While 1984a.
25
— and J-M. Lamoite, 1984, ‘Seasonal variations in
nutrition among a group of nomadic pastoralists in Niger’.
Lancet i, 945-47
Watts, M. J., 1983, The Silent Violence: Food, Famine and
Peasantry in Northern Nigeria. University of California
Press, Berkeley
Swift, J. J.. 1985, Planning against drought and famine in
Turkana. Northern Kenya, Oxfam and Turkana Re
habilitation Project
White. C. H.. 1984a. ‘The WoDaaBe’, in J. Swift (ed).
Pastoral Development m Central Niger, MDR/USAID,
Niamey, Niger
— 1984b, ‘Herd reconstitution: the role of credit among
WoDaaBe herders in central Niger’, Pastoral Development
Network Paper 18d. Overseas Development Institute,
London
Swift, J. J. and A. B. Maliki, 1982, Preliminary Evaluation
of a Pilot Program to Create Herders' Associations m the
Pastoral Zone of Central Niger, Discussion Paper, Niger
Range and Livestock Project, Tahoua. Niger
—1984, ‘A cooperative development experiment among
nomadic herders in Niger’, Pastoral Development Network
Paper 18c, Overseas Development Institute, London
Bulletin vol 17 no 4 October 1986
Mineral Exporters in Boom and Slump
editor: Philip Daniel
Mineral-exporting Ides have suffered more than most in recent years from the wide
fluctuations of prices in international minerals markets. This edition of the Bulletin appraises
changes in the structure of international minerals markets and the determinants of minerals
prices. It provides insights into emerging investment patterns in minerals industries, and into
developments in investor-host country relations. The Bulletin also examines the response of
national economies to mineral booms and slumps sectorally and at the macroeconomic level.
The contributors appraise the scope which mineral exporters may have to insulate themselves
from the dictates of the international market. In responding to fluctuations, the relative merits
of state intervention or private initiative and market forces are examined. Finally, the influence
of mineral booms and slumps upon society, politics and public policy in mineral-exporting
countries is reviewed.
1986 £3.40 including postage
Available from IDS Publications Office, Institute of Development Studies at the University of Sussex,
Brighton BN1 9RE, England
26
Household Food Strategies in Response to Seasonality and Famine
Richard Longhurst
Poor rural families plan for food shortages both
seasonally and for unexpected inter-seasonal events.
This rather obvious fact of life is not often
incorporated into planning of agricultural develop
ment activities. Comparatively little is known about
the insurance mechanisms which families employ to
ensure their household food security: their nature and
resilience and how far different types of families use
different mechanisms, and how rural development
policy might strengthen them. This article will review
these issues and also try to assess the effectiveness of
means of overcoming regular seasonal contingencies
in response to famine conditions. With a few notable
exceptions (e.g. Jodha 1975; Campbell and Trechter
1982] there is little empirical evidence on these
questions; on the other hand there is sufficient to
indicate the diversity of what might be called
‘household food strategies’. The evidence is examined
with particular reference to northern Nigeria where
there has been some research related to these issues
[Norman 1974; Mation 1977; van Apeldoorn 1981;
Longhurst 1986; Watts 1983].
A
Seasonal Coping Strategies
There have been several attempts to categorise what
families do in response to seasonal food shortages.
They can be described in two groups relating to
production, such as diversification, root crops,
exploitation of vertisols (soils with long retention of
surface water and incorporation of organic matter
from the surface), livestock enterprises and bush
collecting; and those which are social adjustments
such as reciprocal economic exchange, gender-linked
allocation of farming tasks and varying modes of
household integration [Moris 1985]. To these might be
added the biological ‘strategies’ of body adaptations:
adapting patterns of energy expenditure, drawing on
body fat stores and changing the composition of the
diet. Generally, in northern Nigeria, as in many other
parts of sub-Saharan Africa and in Asia as well, four
sets of strategies can be identified which are at the
command of rural families. These are choice of
cropping pattern, drawing on stores and assets,
developing and exploiting social relationships, and
diversifying off-farm income opportunities. Each will
now be considered in turn, in the context of research
carried out in the village of Dayi in Hausaland in
northern Nigeria [Longhurst 1984, 1986]. The village
is located in the mild sub-arid Wooded Savanna
ecological zone which receives 750-1000 mm (2440 inches) of rainfall distributed over a period of 120140 days starting at the beginning of May and finishing
at the end of September. The main crops grown by
area are sorghum, millet, cotton and groundnuts. The
agricultural year starts in April, the last month of the
dry season when farmers take their compound and
latrine waste out to the fields as manure. Thereafter
the operations in general are: early ploughing and
planting (May), first weeding (June), second weeding
(July), late ploughing and harvesting of the early
grains of maize and early millet (August), harvesting
of groundnuts (September), harvesting of late grains
ofsorghum and late millet (November-December) and
harvesting of cotton (December-January). If the rains
have arrived on time and in sufficient quantity the
labour peak is that of first and second weeding in June
and July. Moslem Hausa women do not normally
work on farms, being secluded.
(a)
Choice of Cropping Pattern
Farmers generally give priority to the food crops of
sorghum and millet in terms of allocation of their
labour and better, manured land, which is why efforts
to encourage farmers to plant cotton and groundnuts
when the rains first come, in order to achieve higher
yields, have failed. Millet matures in 90-100 days,
compared to the 150-day duration ofsorghum. but it is
lower yielding (about 2-300 kg/ha compared to
750 kg/ha for sorghum). However, the expected
finding that the poor would plant millet because they
had more urgent need of harvested food product did
not materialise. Many poor farmers planted sorghum
and worked as farm labourers to get cash for food
before harvest. Indeed, a higher proportion of
IDS Bulletin. I9K6. vol 17 no 3. Institute of Development Studies, Susses
27
plantings of millet was found among the richer
farmers who used it as an intercrop for their cotton.
Therefore labouring with sorghum later was regarded
as a more effective seasonal food strategy for the poor
than early food in the form of millet but nothing to
follow.
This leads to the questions: does the poorer farmer
intercrop more? Is he ‘forced’ into adopting a
particular cropping pattern which may be low
yielding, farmers having to. say. minimise the variance
of yields so that there is a spread of harvested material
in response to variability in rainfall? Evidence is mixed
because the strategy of mixed cropping is rational both
in terms of profit maximisation and risk minimisation
(Norman 1974]. Again in Dayi there was little
difference in the incidence of mixed cropping between
rich and poor except at two extremes. The very rich
who have access to tractors and oxen with which to
weed crops have advantages leading to sole cropping.
At the other end some of the poor, the old and the
eccentric put larger numbers of crops — seven or more
— onto one Held. If they are not sure of their capacity
to earn cash on off-farm work or farm labouring
during the season, but confident ultimately of family
support, they will aim for early seasonal food. In
particular, for this poor group there is dependence on
gathered foods and intercropping of food crop
varieties such as pumpkin, green maize and bambara
groundnuts that can be consumed direct while
working in the field. The poor plant less (non-food)
‘cash’ crops (in terms of area planted or production
per consumption unit) but all socioeconomic groups
will grow cotton as part of a broader diversifying
strategy of obtaining cash, in addition to labouring
and petty trading. However, it is reasonably clear that
the incidence of crop mixtures at village level does
increase as the length of growing season shortens at
more northerly latitudes [Longhurst 1977].
In the area of Nigeria where this research was carried
out, root crops had declined as a means of meeting
seasonal hunger and only two per cent of the area of
the cropped areas of the village under study was
devoted to cassava. The use offadanta land, which are
areas seasonally water-logged or flooded such as lowlying areas adjacent to streams and depressions, is also
an important seasonal mechanism where they exist.
Mostly, they are in the hands of the richer farmers who
use them to grow high value crops such as vegetables
for sale in urban areas, or perennial crops such as
sugarcane. However .fadamas do tend to be neglected
in the wet season so that in years of poor rainfall they
can be employed as a seasonal mechanism by planting
additional crops. At the end of a poor wet season it is
Counter Seasonal Measures: the Shaivata Flood-spreading project in Tigray Province. Ethiopia.
28
often possible to plant a rapidly maturing variety of
maize in the fadanias [Turner 1984], They can also be
used in the wet season by growing rice.
Secondary crops are also important, providing
nutrients in the period before (generally fixed) cereal
harvests, in addition to diversifying diets and making
them more palatable. They can be divided into four
groups of crops, in increasing order both of labour
requirements per calorie eaten and of firmness and
consistency of intention to harvest [Longhurst and
Lipton 1985]. The latter characteristic is important in
the analysis of the role of secondary crops as seasonal
food crops and as buffers against famine. These
groups are:
(a)
Gathered crops, including wild vegetables
occasionally cultivated, such as species of Cassia
and Lorathus, leaves of the baobob (Adansonia
digitata). In a seasonal, rather than a famine
context, such crops are important as relishes and
salads and for non-food products such as
medicines, rather than providing sustenance.
(b)
Crops mixed into fields of staples such as
legumes, pumpkins and melons, and grown
partly for soil fertility (especially nitrogen
fixation) or canopy effects. In good years they
may not be harvested, or snacked in fields.
Cowpeas are often planted with sorghum but in
Dayi were not harvested; other crops are left for
cattle.
(c)
(d)
Cultivated vegetables in home gardens near the
compound, even inside compound walls where
they will be tended by secluded Moslem women.
Such vegetables, being intensively watered and
manured, can mature early and have a seasonal
role but generally they supply micronutrient
rather than energy sources.
Non-staple root crops grown as a contingency
reserve and which do eventually get harvested.
Plots of cassava are found in villages of northern
Nigeria: labour requirements, including harvest
ing can be spread during the year. The village
level cultivation of cassava plots was a
requirement of the colonial administration in
Nigeria [Watts 1983].
In northern Nigeria secondary crops (seeds, nuts and
legumes, vegetables and fruits), constituted 5.7 percent
of energy intake year-round in nutrition surveys in
Zaria [Simmons 1976] and 7.4 percent in Malumfashi
[Longhurst 1984]. These crops provided 11.2 perveent
and 12.1 per cent of protein intakes respectively. A
recalculation of Simmons' data enables the seasonal
breakdown which shows that the contribution of these
secondary crops to energy intake is at its highest in the
(cereal) pre-harvest period of August-September
(8.6 per cent) compared with the post-harvest periods
of October-November (4.7 per cent) and DecemberJanuary (6.6 per cent) [Longhurst 1985]. The sample
sizes are too small to break them down further in terms
of rich and poor. For some these crops will be
significant dietary sources.
Farmers in northern Nigeria, as in other parts of the
world, are able to exercise a degree of sequential
decision-taking: intercropping on the farm, adjusting
the amount of time and effort they put into them
depending on how the rains progress. For example,
millet can be planted as the rains start and farmers can
follow up with cowpeas and sorghum according to the
distribution of rainfall and their success in off-farm
activities. There is an adaptive flexibility in cropping
patterns that enables a spreading of risks in response
to uncertain rainfall, control of microclimate,
maximum use of the growing season, spreading of
labour requirements, opportunity to make changes in
direction (such as replanting with more drought
resistant varieties) and to get cash from crop sale as
well as food.
(b)
Drawing on Stores and Assets
Families build up stores of assets, livestock, grain and
body fat which they run down in the wet season.
Research from the Gambia and Ghana shows that
adults lose about five to seven per cent of their body
weight during the wet season when energy expenditure
usually exceeds energy intake [Longhurst and Payne
1981]. Body weight is at its highest when intense farm
work begins and declines through the wet season as
energy work requirements exceed intake.
Farmer food grain storage in northern Nigeria is very
effective, with losses from compound granaries as low
as four per cent [Giles 1965]. Also, some research has
shown that in good years farmers are not forced back
into distress selling of grain post harvest when prices
are low. Indeed, farmers can make grain purchases
post harvest if they know they do not have enough
grain to last until next year and it would be cheaper
now than later [Hays 1976; Longhurst 1986]. Grain
appearing on the market at this time derives in part
from the harvest of one or two years earlier. Hays’
study of grain storage and marketing in three villages
found that 11 months after harx’est, there remained in
store on average 18 per cent of the millet and 13.5 per
cent of the sorghum. Therefore farmers may have
greater flexibility in other parts of the world in timing
the seasonal sales of grains. In Dayi, cash from cotton
sales could be used to meet tax and similar obligations
in December. In common with other parts of Africa,
small stock are built up in numbers and then are sold
off in years when food is short; it is the women who
mostly own and invest in small stock: Watts (1983)
29
reports that almost half of the small livestock sold
during the 1973-74 drought belonged to women.
However, running down more durable assets such as
jewellery and selling of farms is more characteristic of
famine than a normal seasonal phenomenon.
(c)
Cultivating Social Relationships
Several complex forms of social relationships exist
which can be regarded as an insurance policy against
outright poverty. In a Muslim society various
redistributive mechanisms already exist, such as the
grain tithe (zakal) and in all villages there is active
giving of food for many reasons, not only to support
the poor. Patron-client relationships are common,
with men providing regular farm labour for rich
farmers in return for wages and food. Patrons will give
additional support if food shortages turn into famine.
In addition there are complex gift-giving relationships
which occur between men and between women. There
is a contribution system known as biki. in which one
person makes a gift of cash to another in the
expectation that it will be returned and even doubled
at a later date. When contributions reach an
impossibly high level they are reduced by mutual
consent. Contributions are also made in times of need.
Women develop friendships (Aawa) with other
women, usually from very early on in life, with whom a
formal gift-giving relationship occurs.
Relationships between families, in addition to those
that exist within families (such as the male labour and
food sharing institution of gandu) are intensified
during seasonal shortages.
(d)
Diversifying Off-farm and Income Sources
Those who have a seasonal off-farm work are those
who are not discomfited by seasonality. Trades such as
blacksmith, butcher, provisions trader and carpenter
find steady demand for their services. The detailed
labour activity surveys carried out by Norman and his
co-workers in Zaria showed that time devoted to
occupations other than farm work remains constant
throughout the year, being 6'/, days per month in the
cultivating season and 7-9 days in the ‘slack’ season
[Norman 1972]. Of the average number of working
days of adult males, 61 per cent were spent on the
family farm. There is a great range of secondary
occupations in Hausaland and seasonal difficulties are
most easily weathered by those who have access to one
or several of these. The type of work that men do is in
large part inherited, which forms the basis of an
occupational class distinction, although most have a
‘closed shop’ or guild aspect which restricts entry.
Therefore the poor have less opportunity than the rich
to employ this form of counterseasonal strategy.
Women, although secluded, are active entrepreneurs
30
and also contribute by trade and loans to overcoming
seasonal shortages of food.
This section has looked at seasonal strategies; in the
next section famine-related responses are described
and discussed. Many are extensions and diversifications
of those described here and it has been on occasion
difficult to draw the line between the two. In this
context the research by Campbell and Trechter (1982)
in North Cameroon proves most pertinent, as one aim
of their study was to examine the behavioural
differences in coping strategies between expected and
unexpected food shortages. They have categorised
response mechanisms by seriousness of the shortages,
if men or women are involved and by level of
nutritional status in the family. Three levels in the
development of shortages are proposed: first, the
seasonal food shortage period (soudure) when actual
food supplies are scarce or non existent; then second,
when food might be available for purchase, but
inaccessible to people for economic reasons; the third
type of shortage is famine, usually precipitated by a
natural disaster: at thestageof.ro«r/u/e(a three-month
period from June/July to Scptembcr/Oclober),
slaughter of livestock, especially small stock is the
most common response, reported by both men and
women. In a better off village the extent of these
activities was less than in the two other villages studies.
Women appeared to have a greater diversity of
responses, suggesting that they are more directly
concerned with food shortages in the soudure, some of
these responses are directly related to the soudure, such
as reducing meal portions or not eating for a whole
day, whereas others would be employed during any
period of difficulty, such as buying food or selling
labour. It appears that men play a subordinate role to
women in coping with food shortages, as the latter
reported receiving gifts or loans of food and money
from neighbours and relatives. In the poorest village.
alteration of eating habits, after selling livestock, was
most common. The villagers there did not possess
other resources with which to trade. Gifts and loans
between families were an important soudure
mechanism: a sharing of poverty with the knowledge
that all families can be vulnerable to food shortages at
any time.
The coping mechanisms for the second stage of food
shortages — those of an economic and distributional
nature characterised by a breakdown in the ability of
cooperative efforts and liquidation of capital assets to
deal with the deficit — as reported by both men and
women were significantly different from stage one
(soudure) mechanisms. These were family assistance,
wild foods, food purchases, migration, selling stock,
special planting (of crops planted specifically as an
insurance against a bad year) and selling food. Selling
livestock and borrowing food or money were less
important. Again women and men might carry out
different actions but both are equally involved in
combating the deficits. Women plant special foods
and use food reserves, while migration was reported
by the men. Gathering wild foods and migration are
regarded as onerous and unattractive measures. In an
effort to identify any behaviour patterns which
indicated a transition from soudure to stage two,
Campbell and Trcchter stratified the sample of
families by their level of nutrition as measured by
calorie intake. The lowest quartile had a mean calorie
consumption of 63 per cent of requirements; the
highest had a level of 138 per cent of requirements. The
families with the lowest intake were regarded as being
in a stage two situation and the data indicated that
they did behave differently from better nourished
households. Women would miss meals for an entire
day and men would migrate. Poor families collected
wild foods while the better nourished families resorted
to borrowing food or money.
Distinguishing between normal seasonal stress and
famine therefore has its difficulties, although many
would agree with Currey's description that famine is
‘like insanity, hard to define, but glaring enough when
recognised’ [Currey 1978: quoting Taylor] and with
Seaman and Holt (1980) that it is ‘easily recognised
and quite distinct from even the extremes of poverty’
(p.284). Seasonal shortages for some produce famine
conditions for others, especially the poor. The greatest
difficulty is in deciding where the threshold point lies
between the two. The next section discusses those
strategies used by families in response to these more
severe food shortages.
definition based on food shortages [following the
work of Sen 1981] is incomplete, may even be wrong
and the extent of significant levels of mortality with a
famine over and above‘normal’ death rates, especially
in an impoverished area due to starvation, is subject to
difficulties in assessment. Famines are not usually a
matter of already bad times getting worse, but
apparently lead to changes in community and family
structure that cannot easily be reversed. This might be
in the form of action taken by communities — mass
migration, disintegration of families, sale of assets,
even children, or sharp increases in prostitution. In
other words these are events which do not normally
take place and occur after normal response
mechanisms have been exhausted. Chambers’ (1981)
useful distinction between normal seasonal events as
‘screws’ which drive people into poverty from which
they get temporary (usuallydry season) reprieve, and
‘rachets’ which are circumstances that lead to
irrecoverable loss of resources could apply as an
analogy between seasonality and famines. However,
the ability of people to overcome the effects of famine
should not be underestimated. The causes of famine
are several, including drought, floods, disease and war
all overlaid on poverty. However, in terms of physical
phenomena drought is usually associated with most
famines, and forms the basis of the discussion here.
Responses to famine start with a diversification and
intensification of existing activities. Then there is the
following sequence of events [based on Jodha 1975,
Watts 1983):
(a)
Domestic mutual support; intensification of‘fall
back' activities by household members including
gathering of foods; restructuring of current farm
activities to maximise effective availability of
products, including a variety of salvage
operations.
(b)
Minimisation of current commitments through
suspension or cancellation of resource allocation
including grain loans and tax relief.
(c)
Disposal of inventories of home-produced foods
as well as purchased foods stocked for some
planned use such as marriage; village charitable
relief, grain purchase and patron support.
(d)
Sale or mortgage of assets with a sequence based
on liquidity and productivity of assets with a
preference towards mortgage rather than sale.
(e)
Short or long term migration, possibly taking
animals.
(f)
Famine relief from state or patron assistance.
(g)
Possible return, recovery, replanting and recon
stitution of reserves.
B Famine Coping Strategies
Several definitions of famine have been proposed,
both by those who study it and by those who suffer
from it. From the former group there are ‘widespread
food shortages leading to a significant rise in the
regional death rates’ [Blix, Hofvander and Valquist
1971 ]; ‘The community syndrome which results when
social, economic and administrative structures are
under stress, and are further triggered by one, or
several discrete disruptions which accelerate the
incidence of many symptoms, or crisis adjustments, of
which one is epidemic malnutrition' [Currey 1978:87]
and ‘It is an abnormal breakdown in access to food
which leads to mass starvation among vulnerable
groups or classes of people’ [Cutler 1985]. Local
cultures in Bangladesh define three types of famine:
scarcity is akal (when times are bad); famine is
durvichkha (when alms are scarce) and nationwide
famine is mananthar (when the epoch changes); in
northern Nigeria there arc about a dozen terms for
different degrees of famine-hunger or yunwa. What do
these definitions and other observations tell us? A
31
A second typology of responses relating to social
factors has been suggested by Dirks (1980). There are
three stages: alarm, resistance and exhaustion, and
this typology does provide complementary information
to that described above. A famine that begins under
cover of expected seasonal fluctuations docs not at
first generate alarm. Thereafter there is increased
activity, even hyperactivity, and intensification of
work (which has in some instances converted a food
shortage into a famine, especially when hoarding has
occurred): markets become glutted with perishable
food, movements of people, general irritability,
hostility and political unrest occur and the performance
of ritual tends to increase. At the stage of resistance, an
energy conserving strategy ensues: with sustained
undernutrition hypoactivity occurs, social ties erode
and social interaction is reduced.
Individuals drop friends and extended kin from food
sharing rituals, restricting reciprocity to close
relatives. Competition intensifies and theft increases.
Exhaustion is marked by the collapse of the family
unit, with the elderly the first to be pushed out;
children may forage in gangs. At this stage further
adjustment is not possible without external relief.
The stages of (a) to (e) above which are those of
household response show a mixture of the normal (in
respect of expected fluctuations) and abnormal (in
respect of contingencies). Some of the normal are not
used by the rich in good seasons; some of the abnormal
are used by the poor in every season, so deepening
their impoverishment. In this section we pick out three
strategies which might be used more in famine
conditions rather than average seasons. These are
gathering of foods, migration and sale of farm land
and other assets. It should be pointed out however,
that knowledge in this area is limited. Even in normal
limes information about sales of assets, transactions
between individuals with respect to loans and
remittances to and from migrants, is sensitive and
difficult to obtain. During a famine there are both
ethical and organisational questions to carrying out
research, but given the need to obtain solid empirical
information to prevent the recurrence of famines, and
the costly and usually tardy response of the aid
donors, sensitive investigations are very much needed.
Such research will require a great deal of rapport
between investigator and subjects, suggesting that the
research framework should have been m place prior to
the onset of famine conditions. This research would
require a high level of commitment.
(i)
Gathering of Foods
Some foods are specifically designated by local people
as ‘famine foods’. These are usually foods growing
wild: vegetables, nuts, berries and parts of trees. In
32
normal times they are consumed only by the very poor
and their consumption is usually a sign of shame.
Therefore in the Bangladesh famine of 1974-75 people
consumed banana tree, wild arum (Araceae spp),
plantain saplings (Musa paradisical, leaves and rice
husk [Currey 1978; Rahaman 1978]. In the Bihar
famine of 1965-66 a higher consumption of green leafy
vegetables was found in severely affected villages due
to extensive use of wild leaves. Wild tubers were
consumed in drought-affected parts of Andra
Pradesh. In the famine in Karamoja, Uganda during
1980, 41 per cent of the population was subsisting on
wild weeds, fruits and seeds collected in the bush, or
had consumed no food all day [Biellik and Henderson
1981]. These woody fruits and seeds had little
nutritional significance but could temporarily stave
off the worst physical effects of hunger. In northern
Dafur. Sudan, in 1973 most people collected the seeds
of wild growing grasses [Holy 1980].
In northern Nigeria there is a wide range of these
‘famine foods’, which include those gathered day to
day as relishes and supplements to soups. Two crops
cultivated in anticipation of drought or famine periods
are cassava and bambara groundnut. The response of
the household is to diversify food sources. More use is
made of tree products such as the African locust bean
(Parkia spp) and shrubs, especially Borassusflabcilifer,
Pitex cienkowshi, Fiens theanengii and Maerua
angolensis. Other foods including green leafy
vegetables are collected, such as species of Corathus,
Cassia and Adansonia digitata. Trees, with deeper
rooting systems, are able to provide food both in dry
seasons and during droughts.
There is very little information available in quantitative
terms on how important gathered foods become
during a famine. Ina poor tribal group in India during
a normal pre-harvest seasonal shortage, gathered
foods contributed 12 per cent of energy intake before
harvest compared to two per cent post-harvest [Pingle
1975]. In Mali a berry from the shrub Boscia
senegalcnsis becomes the staple food of poor RimaiBe
households, making up the evening meal in addition to
a midday meal of millet [Martin 19851.
(ii)
Migration
The sight of large numbers of people on the move is the
major indicator that a famine is occurring. Again, in
northern Nigeria these movements arc an intensi
fication of the migration of normal times, that of the
dry season cin rani. Whole families migrate rather than
just males. From one village in Niger, the number of
able-bodied males migrating increased from 37 per cent
in 1969/70 to 75 per cent in the drought year of
1973/74. looking for work in the large Nigerian towns
of Lagos and Kano [Faulkingham 19771.
There is a vast array of different classes of migratory
movement ranging from ‘normal’ movement for
economic advancement with eventual return, to that
of moving for survival to places where free food might
be distributed. Cutler (1985) has documented how
when outright famine conditions occurred in Ethiopia
the flow of people to roadsides, towns and camps
increases dramatically over a short period: those
crossing the Sudan border rose from 300 per day in
September 1984 to 3,000 per day by the end of
November. Nevertheless many of these people
intended to return with the onset of rains. The
effectiveness of migration as a famine strategy
depends on the spread and extent of famine (migrants
of course can export high food prices and hence food
shortages with them) and the effectiveness of relief
efforts.
(iii)
Sale of Farmland and Assets
Most families will prefer to mortgage rather than sell
farmland, although in northern Nigeria the pledging is
often the forerunner to outright sale. Among
pastoralists, sales of livestock are more common, even
inevitable. As more assets come onto the market,
prices fall so that the rich, who may not be suffering
but even by taking advantage of the poor, can acquire
land and animals at advantageous prices. For
livestock there is an order of sales, with small stock
being sold first followed by older and male animals.
Breeding stock are kept until last. Household foods
and farming equipment are sold just prior to
migration.
This brief review of these response helps us a little in
understanding the hierarchy of responses as outlined
by Jodha and Watts. Jodha’s empirical research in
Rajasthan investigated curtailment of commitments
and sale of assets, inventories and outmigration as the
drought year progressed. Two-thirds of the households
had sold assets and over one quarter had outmigrated
between the dates of declaration of scarcity and the
commencement of relief work (about six months).
Curtailment in current consumption (such as reducing
family food consumption, non-milking of animals to
permit milk for calves) is resorted to in the early phase
of the scarcity period, together with sales of
inventories such as fuel wood, dung cakes, timbers,
ropes, mats and wool. Once these are exhausted,
mortgaging and in a few cases (about 8 per cent total)
sale of assets begins. This begins with unproductive
assets such as ornaments and utensils. Jodha’s
research shows that relief measures have to be
implemented before assets — as sources of future
income — arc sold, and that such indicators arc signs
of true distress rather than adaptive responses such as
curtailment of consumption, which can return to
normal after the famine has passed. Similarly
Mortimer (1985) has shown that in northern Nigeria,
there is a wide range of adaptive responses similar to
curtailing consumption, engaged in by
of the
population. These activities include labouring,
consumption of famine foods and Firewood selling.
There is then a second group of responses engaged by
'/r'/j of the population which bite into economic
resources i.e. selling property, land, and animals,
taking out of loans.
C
Conclusions
The descriptive material presented here enables only a
partial answer to the questions posed at the beginning
of the article. Rural families can extend their normal
seasonal mechanisms to meet a drought inspired
famine but the poorest of families have to begin early
in disposing of their assets and resources. The effect of
both severe seasonality and famines is to accentuate
income disparities between families. The active role of
women in countering drought and famines has been
shown; in many parts of the world they are responsible
forgathering foods and managing small livestock. The
resilience of coping mechanisms has not been well
documented but it is obvious that with increasing
population pressure, and the erosion of common
property resources and cultivatable land, such
mechanisms are losing effectiveness. Nonetheless
Cutler (1985) has documented how families in
Ethiopia survived as many as six years of poor
harvests before having to migrate in 1972-74, and
about four years prior to the famine of 1983-84.
Measures to improve rural welfare must not
undermine the mechanisms that have been described
here. Promoting sole cropping at the expense of mixed
cropping, removing trees in favour of cultivated crops
and neglecting secondary crops, especially cassava in
semi arid areas, are all examples of destructive
policies. New strategies are required to develop these
coping mechanisms with a bias towards those who use
them and live by them. This requires strengthening the
food crops used in periods of drought by conservation
and breeding programmes; a better understanding of
the efficiency of household grain storage so that
community stores could be established with similar
effectiveness to moderate food price rises to provide
reserves in times of acute shortage. An essential part of
both famine prevention and relief is to develop an
early warning system based on household indicators
of stress, to provide resources so that families are not
forced into disintegration and migration. Finally, a
promising area of policy related research concerns the
interplay of seasonal organisations [Fortmann 1985]
and credit availability to avoid asset sales or assist in
reconstitution. This might well be linked to the
experimental programmes of international agencies
and national governments to provide ‘cash-for-food’.
Such projects have given cash — sometimes linked to
33
community development works — to families affected
by famine to avoid them disintegrating and to enable
them to enter local credit markets. This cash might be
obtained from sales of food aid.
What is required is a new approach to thinking about
these problems related to rural poverty: not a ‘backto-nature' way which gives excessive weight to
traditional mechanisms but one which uses them as
the first step in developing more effective ones.
References
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status and dietary conditions in a food deficit region: North
Tcso District. Uganda, December 1980', Ecology of Food
and Nutrition 11 ppi63-70
Blix. G.. Y. Hofvander and B. Valquist, 1971, Famine: A
Symposium Dealing with Nutrition and Relief Operations in
Times of Disaster, Amlquist and Wiksells. Uppsala
Campbell. D. J., and D. D. Trechter, 1982, ‘Strategies for
coping with food consumption shortage in the Mandara
Mountains Region of North Cameroon’, Social Science
and Medicine, 16 pp2117-27
Chambers, R., 1981, ‘Introduction’ in Chambers. Longhurst
and Pacey (eds.)
Chambers, R., R. Longhurst and A. Pacey (eds.). 1981.
Seasonal Dimensions to Rural Poverty, Frances Pinter,
London
Currey, B.. 1978, ‘Famine Symposium Report: the famine
syndrome: its definition for relief and rehabilitation in
Bangladesh’, Ecology of Food and Nutrition, 7, pp87-98
Cutler, P., 1985, The Use ofEconomic and Social Information
in Famine Prediction and Response, Report to ODA.
London
Dirks, R.. 1980, ‘Social responses during severe food
shortages and famine’. Current Anthropology vol 21 no 1,
pp21-44
Faulkingham, R.. 1977, ‘Ecological constraints and sub
sistence strategies: the impact of drought in a Hausa village:
a case study from Niger' in D. Dalby, R. Harrison Church
and F. Bczzaz(eds.), Drought in Africa!, African Environ
ment Special Report 6, I Al, London
Fortmann, L., 1985, ‘Seasonal dimensions of rural social
organisations’. Journal ofDevelopment Studies, 21. pp377-89
Holy, L., 1980, ‘Drought and change in a tribal economy:
the Bcrti of Northern Dafur', Disasters vol 4 no 1, pp65-71
Jodha, N. S.. 1975, ‘Famine and famine policies: some
empirical evidence'. Economic and Political Weekly,
October, ppi609-23
Longhurst, R., 1977. ‘Calorie expenditure and cropping
patterns’, IDS. Sussex (mimeo)
—1984, ‘The Energy Trap: Work. Nutrition and Child Mal
nutrition in Northern Nigeria', Cornell Internationa!
Nutrition Monograph Series No 13, Ithaca
—1985, Secondary Crops. Seasonality and Women’s Work:
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Rome
—1986. Farm Level Decision Making. Social Structure and the
Introduction of a Rural Development Project in Northern
Nigeria. Samaru Miscellaneous Paper 106, Ahmadu Bello
University, Zaria
Longhurst. R. and R. Payne. 1981. ‘Seasonal aspects of
nutrition’ in R. Chambers. R. Longhurst and A. Pacey (eds.)
Longhurst. R.. and M. Lipton. 1985, ‘Secondary food crops
and the reduction of seasonal food insecurity: The role
of agricultural research' Papere presented at the IFPRI/
FAO/AID Workshop on Seasonal Causes of Household
Food Insecurity: Policy Implications and Research
Needs, Annapolis. Maryland
Martin. M., 1985, ‘Design of a food intake study in two
Bambara villages in the Segon Region of Mali with pre
liminary findings', in A. Hill (ed.) Population. Health and
Nutrition in the Sahel, Routledge and Kegan Paul, London
Mation, P.. 1977. ‘The Size Distribution, Structure and
Determinants of Personal Income among Farmers in the
North of Nigeria', PhD Thesis, Cornell University,
Ithaca
Moris, J., 1985. ‘Indigenous versus introduced solutions to
food stress’. Paper presented at the IFPRI/FAO/AID
Workshop in Seasonal Causes of Household Food
Insecurity, Policy Implications and Research Needs,
Annapolis, Maryland
Mortimer, M., 1985. ‘Social responses to drought and
desertification in West Africa’, Seminar at University
of Sussex, January* 31, 1985
Norman. D. W., 1972, ‘An Economic Survey of three villages
in Zaria Province, 2. Input-output study: Vol (i) Text',
SamaruMiscellaneous Paper 37, Ahmadu Bello University.
Zaria
Giles, P. H., 1965, ‘The storage of cereals by farmers in
northern Nigeria’, Samaru Research Bulletin 42, Institute
for Agricultural Research, Ahmadu Bello University. Zaria
Norman, D.. 1974, ‘Rationalising mixed cropping under
indigenous conditions: the example of northern Nigeria’.
Journal of Development Studies vol 11 no 1, pp3-21
Hays, H. M., 1976, ‘The storage of cereal grains in three
villages of Zaria province, northern Nigeria', Samaru
Research Bulletin 269, Institute for Agricultural Research.
Ahmadu Bello University, Zaria
Pingle. V.. 1975. ‘Some studies of two tribal groups of
Central India: Part 2: nutritive importance of foods
consumed in two different seasons’, Plant Foodfor Man, 1,
ppi 95-208
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Rahaman, M. Mujibur, 1978, ‘The cause and effects of
famine in the rural population: a report from Bangladesh’
Ecology of Food and Nutrition 7, pp99-IO2
Turner, B., 1984, ‘Changing land-use patterns in lhefadamas
of northern Nigeria’, in E. Scott (cd.). Life Before the
Drought, George Allen & Unwin, Boston
Seaman, J., and J. Holt, 1980, ‘Markets and famines in the
Third World’, Disasters vol 4 no 3, pp283-98
van Apeldoorn, G. J., 1981, Perspectives on Drought and
Famine in Nigeria, George Allen & Unwin, London
Sen, A. K., 1981, Poverty and Famine: An Essay in Entitle
ment and Deprivation, Clarendon Press, Oxford
Watts, M., \933,Silent Violence: Food. Famine and Peasantry
in northern Nigeria, California University Press, Berkeley
Simmons, E., 1976, ‘Calorie and protein intakes in three
villages of Zaria Province. May 1970-June 1971’, Samani
Miscellaneous Paper No 55, Ahmadu Bello University,
Zaria
EUROPEAN ASSOCIATION OF
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35
Biomass, Man and Seasonality in the Tropics
Colin Leakey'
Introduction
'Biomass’ has become one of the modern cliches. Most
things discussed beneath its shade were in existence
long before the word was invented, and many have
been forgotten. Nevertheless, considering the
seasonality of biomass and its use by man, it creates a
good frame of reference for addressing problems of
the human condition in the tropics. 1 welcome the
opportunity to contribute to the discussion.
1 shall not attempt a rigid definition of biomass, for
definitions can constrain thought, but will point out
that by biomass I am referring to structured organic
matter, living or dormant, and sometimes even dead,
and comprised within the plant kingdom, the animal
kingdom and micro-biological organisms. Biomass
has become important in recent discussion, and
particularly since the inauguration of the International
Biological Programme (IBP), because its production,
primarily through photosynthesis and thence by
transformation in food chains, is a good measure of
renewable resource potential.
The IBP was set up in 1964 to explore and define ‘The
Biological Basis of Productivity and Human Welfare’
and because of the recognition then that the security of
rapidly expanding human populations called for more
rational management of natural resources.
The renewable energy potential (for heat or work)
occupies the greatest part of the biomass literature
[Montalembert 1983). but since biomass potential also
provides limits to food production potential (in spite
of this potential rarely being reached or even
approximated) the biomass concept provides a frame
of reference for considering the competing demands
for food and fuel energy.
Annual Versus Seasonal Data Sets
Most are aware of some advantages of data
compression, but compression of seasonal data to
1 I wish to acknowledge the assistance of Susan Leakey.
IDS Bullcitn. 1986. vol 17 no 3. Institute of Development Studies. Sussex
36
annual data in relation to crop production has long
been recognised as unfruitful, though it is surprising
how often one sees annual data uncritically tabulated
or quoted.
Much environmental data of significance to man’s
ecology is quoted in the form of monthly means, and
such figures for many parameters are quite useful. The
production of new biomass through photosynthesis
depends of course on a concurrence of suitable
temperatures, and. on occasion, the duration per day
of solar radiation, which varies seasonally to a greater
extent the further one departs from the equator, and
on soil moisture. The latter depends on rainfall and
loss of water from the root zone. The root zone in turn
depends upon the depth of rooting which different
species are able to exploit.
Photoperiod and Seasonality
The adaptation of many indigenous plants that
reproduce by seed involves a precise timing of seed
production and dispersal which maximises the chance
of satisfactory re-establishment in the succeeding
season. This is largely achieved by what is called
photoperiodism. The length of dark period (night
length) determines when flowering, and hence seeding.
occurs. Under natural selection, genes or gene
combinations determining that precise photoperiodic
adaptation are selected in each latitudinally adapted
sub-population of species. Frequently, under man’s
selection in research stations or under less sophisticated
selection, it has been considered advantageous to
eliminate photoperiod sensitivity and to develop
strains that can be sown and cropped under wider
latitude conditions. It is implied in this selection that
agricultural practices will make less necessary the
naturally selected adaptations forsurvival. It has to be
questioned, when satisfactory agricultural husbandry
conditions can not in fact be met, whether dismantling
naturally evolved mechanisms of adaptation are as
beneficial as has sometimes been supposed.
Moisture Regime and Seasonality
Mean seasonal data, unless used critically, may
obscure the biologically very important variation of
reliability/unreliability of rainfall at particular times
of the year. Manning (1950, 1955) was probably the
first to point this out, and present an approach using
‘confidence’ limit parameters based on statistical
analysis of year to year variation in rainfall in the same
calendar periods. Other workers for the Cotton
Corporation brought the analysis forward into the
computer age [Walker and Rijks 1967] — an
important early example of the use of computers in
agricultural support. The environmentalists at
ICR1SAT have made great strides in the analysis of
rainfall reliability as well as seasonality in semi-arid
areas, for example, in Niger [Sivakumar, Virmani and
Reddy, undated].
The treatment of climate in the conference on
seasonality held in 1978 [Walsh 1981], while good in
some respects seems to me to step backwards by not
commenting on the overriding effect of lack of
reliability over climatic characterisation based on
seasonal means. A seasonal classification based on
monthly means, and through these an analysis of the
numbers of wet and dry months (averaged across
years) is likely to be a much better predictor of
potential useful biomass production when applied to
deep rooted plants (such as most natural climax
vegetation) than to shallow rooted ones often resulting
from the deflected successions, far removed from
climax, which result from man's activities in the
environment. (As 1 sit writing this in my study I am
looking at an Australian calendar with a photograph
of a magnificent, totally green gum tree in a landscape
where there are no living shallow rooted annuals.)
Once man becomes a significant part of the ecosystem
he himself must develop flexible strategies to cope with
the increased unreliability of biomass potential
production which he produces if he is to survive. It
could be claimed (although this is a somewhat broad
generalisation) that by encouraging agriculture based
on shallow rooted crops typical of temperate
agriculture, those who intended to assist in the
development of food security have used a strategy
which is likely to do just the reverse.
Plant Life-forms and Seasonality
The concept of the diversity of life-form in higher
plants as a basis of adaptation to climatic seasonality
has a long history in classical botany. One of the most
famous names is that of Raunkiaer. who in 1910
distinguished groups of plants according to the modes
of protection and size of the meristem (buds) which
would enable them to make the most effective use of
the conditions of moisture and temperature allowing
growth to occur. This is not the place to review
Raunkiaer’s life forms in detail, but he envisaged a
different ‘biological spectrum’ of plant life forms
characteristic of and adapted to different climates
[Skene 1924]. The discussion of life-form in relation to
seasonal production of biomass that man might use
for his welfare is something which nutritionists and
agronomists may wish to revive.
Geophytes
Geophytes, in Raunkiaer’s classification, comprised
that group of plants whose perennial’life form’ allows
for seasonal protection of the vegetative meristem
from which growth will be resumed to be in an
underground position — for example, in an organ
such as a bulb or tuber. The protection of vegetative
buds as an aspect of classification of plant types is
interesting also in relation to biotic pressures on
biomass. Although it may not have been stated in such
terms, the recognition of the value of cassava as a
famine reserve crop in Africa during the colonial
agricultural period depended upon the combined
value of unpalatability of the parts of the plant above
ground to locusts, and there being a high proportion
of the plant biomass underground where it was in any
case protected from predators.
Within the framework of ‘modernised agriculture’
there has been all too little work on the development of
new food resources based on combinations of
biological, as opposed to technological, factors of
storability. This reflects a continuing concept that
modern agriculture ought to be made labour-saving,
technologically efficient and increasingly capital
intensive. Root crops, through lack of sufficient
attention by plant breeders have not lent themselves to
mechanised modernisation. While the potato in
temperate countries has received sufficient attention
for it to be treated as a large-scale mechanised farm
crop, it is still severely limited to cultivation on a small
range of soil types. Efforts in the tropics to turn
cassava into a simply mechanised crop have been
recognised as a worth-while research goal by only a
select few, and the resources allocated to this task have
not been great.
In much of tropical Africa there is no clear distinction,
even under favourable climatic conditions, between
agriculture and gathering of indigenous plants for
foods as contributions to regular food supply
[Tallantire and Goode 1975; Jerome et al. 1980]. In
some desert and semi-desert areas, staple food is
regularly harvested from naturally occurring geophytes
[Malan and Owen-Smith 1975], just as was apparently
the practice in earlier times in the south western USA
[Nabhan and Felger 1980].
Unimproved and neglected wild plants that continue
to provide famine reserve food from their underground
37
storage organs, for those with the knowledge and skills
to find them, are not even discussed in most academic
agricultural training — or only to a minimal extent
[Irvine 1952], There arc many such plants awaiting
study.
Most of the swollen rooted and tuberous species,
which can potentially sustain man by their stored
reserves in seasons unfavourable for above-ground
food production, contain toxins.
As with cassava, it is probable that many of the
geophytes could be selected or bred for low levels of
toxicity. This could well deprive them of their ability
to resist predation by man’s competitors in the
ecosystem. Man’s intelligence has allowed him, rather
than his competitors in the food system, to use
otherwise toxic plants in times of famine by learning
how to de-toxify them. This is an important
alternative strategy to that of breeding or selecting
‘sweet’ versions of the species concerned, and is an
aspect of the chemurgic2 approach to food suggested
by Pirie (1962). Of the geophytes, a substantial list of
species of many genera and families are known to be
used, or have been used, successfully as man’s food.
Many of these grow in harsh climatic conditions of
highly unreliable as well as seasonal rainfall. The
geophyte habit is an adaptation to the unreliability of
primary production, of which primitive man long ago
recognised the value to himself. Could not modern
man do the same?
Phanerophytes
Phanerophytes are the life-form of perennial species
which include trees and shrubs in which the buds
(meristem) which remain dormant as a means of
surviving the non-growing season are carried well
above ground. People continue to use a much greater
number of trees than geophyte species for food,
though most of the trees that are used today provide
sweet pulpy fruits of one sort or another, or nuts and
oil-bearing seeds. The hiving-off of phanerophytes
from mainstream agriculture, either into pomological
horticulture or into silviculture, can be seen in
retrospect to have been a disservice to research
support for man’s food resources. Even the modern
invention of the term ‘agro-forestry’ [King and
Chandler 1978] which may yet provide a theatre for a
tree food strategy has, until now, failed to achieve
much more than encouraging foresters to think about
the relationship between their trees and the
agriculturalist’s crops.
1 Chemurgy implies finding ways to make effective use of what grows
naturally as an alternative to manipulating (he environment by
agricultural technology in order to grow desired species that would
not thrive naturally.
38
The benefits of phanerophytes in ’agricultural’
systems have been most apparent in equatorial rainfall
areas, where the problem of superceding indigenous
perennial crop-based systems with mechanised
therophytic agriculture have been those of access to
the land by machinery and the problems of soil
management, including erosion. Regrettably, it has
been far easier to till the land made available by
destroying trees in semi-arid environments with highly
unreliable rainfall. The use made by unschooled
indigenous people in such environments of trees for
food is only just beginning to be appreciated, and the
productivity of such systems measured.
The publication of the proceedings of the arid lands
conference at Kew (KICEPAL — Kcw International
Conference on Economic Plants in Arid Lands [see
Wickens et al. 1984] may prove a turning point in
economists’ and planners' perceptions of the future
role of tree crops far beyond the plantation
agricultural concepts of the equatorial tropics. If, as
examples, one were to pick only a handful of
important resource species whose role had been
neglected, it would include Parkin biglobosa, the
African locust bean, which provides a weaning food
from the orange-coloured pulp of the seed pod, and a
widely used and nutritious condiment from its
fermented seed; Adansonia digitala, the baobab, of
which the white pulp around the seeds of the large
fruits is an important starchy food for many; Phoenix
dactilifera. the date palm which is cultivated far
beyond is traditional range by the use of suitable
genotypes; and Ficus sycaniorus, the tree fig. There are
many other food trees however, equally deserving of
greater attention. Some of these phanerophytes,
moreover, have advantages of what superficially
might be considered perverse phenology. Such trees
and shrubs expand their tender, fresh flushes of leaves
during the dry season and drop their old leaves during
the wet season. Perhaps the most famous of these is
Acacia albida, which, on account of this, can provide
both useful browse for cattle in the dry season and
plenty of light beneath its canopy in the wet season to
allow the growth of therophytic crops. It is
unfortunate that this much-favoured tree species has
seeds which, although superficially palatable, are also
potentially dangerously toxic to man since they
contain the same unusual free amino acid as Lathyrus
sativus [Qureshi et al. 1977],
A second example of an important food shrub with
new leaves developing in the dry season in West Africa
is Moringa pterygosperma (the ben tree) which is very
widely grown around the edge of house compounds,
and whose leaves provide one of the most important
dry season pot herbs. Better known than the human
food trees, but I believe insufficiently appreciated, are
the forage trees such as Daniella oliveri, whose leaf
production in the dry season provides most of the dry
season feed for the cattle of the Fulani. The extent to
which this is overlooked can be judged from the fact
that Sandford’s recent book makes no mention
whatever, in a chapter on the use of trees as livestock
food [Sandford 1983].
and biomass use for energy are widely discussed. Less
fashionable is the use of plant resources for drugs in
the wide sense, including the local medicine man’s
pharmacopoeia and the widespread use of simple
stimulants. These have important seasonal aspects.
Pharmacognosy-
Therophytes, including Ephemerals
Therophytes comprise those plants in which the
dormant bud is enclosed within seeds as a means of
surviving the non-growing season. Many traditional
edible seed producing species are largely overlooked in
agricultural project planning, but some may have
great potential in marginal areas [Dendy, Emmett and
Oke 1975]. Within this life form can be distinguished
‘ephemerals’, species with extremely rapid life-cycles
which are able to germinate from seed and pass
through a complete life-cycle to the production of new
seed on the minimum amount of water, and in the
shortest time. Hardly surprisingly, such species do not
figure in lists of useful crop plants where yields are
measured in quantity per unit area regardless of the
length of the growing period (as mustard and cress is
not compared with alfalfa as a forage crop!). There
has been an interest since the emergence of the biomass
concept, and the International Biological Programme
is taking more interest in yield as a function of
duration of life cycle as well as area, but this does not
seem to have moved far enough to considering the
potential role of highly ephemeral species as crops.
Even with the widening of the number of species of
‘millet’ now being studied by ICRISAT, I understand
[Willey 1985 personal communication] that no serious
attention is being given to the one or more (depending
on your taxonomic viewpoint) species of Digitaria
(Digitaria exi/is, etc.) sometimes called ‘hungry millet’
in West Africa. Yet the importance of this millet in
those communities where it is regularly grown is rated
very high. On the contrary, agricultural research
emphasising yield per unit area must, if anything, have
tended to favour selection of cultivars of crop species
requiring longer periods of moisture availability. In
eastern and south-central Africa, specifically in
southern Tanzania, northern Zambia and northern
Malawi, the farmers themselves have conserved and
continue to grow ultra-early maturing varieties of
both finger millet, which is an indigenous crop, and
maize. Where maize is concerned, genetic resources of
the early introductions by the Portuguese are in many
areas much better adapted than the white, semi-dense
varieties introduced from South Africa by the
missionaries early in the 19th century. Governments
usually want to ‘flush’ these out with new varieties.
The Uses of Plants by Man
The potential conflicts between biomass use for food
Knowledge about the medicinal properties of plants
and how to recognise them is what is covered by this
scientific subject area, that is of rapidly renewing
interest [Trease and Evans 1978]. Until about 50 years
ago, collections from wild plants, or occasionally from
species specially cultivated, provided a large proportion
of the world’s medicine. The synthetic chemical
industry and, more recently, micro-biological contri
bution to the pharmaceutical industry have both had
potentially adverse effects on the rural economy of
man. This arises from what is taught by those from the
towns, and increasingly accepted as true by rural
people, that medicinal contributions to health arise
from the urban sector. Whether they are paid for, or
provided free, may make a financial difference, but in
either case the change serves to make rural living more
dependent on urban industry. The early years of this
century saw most ‘native medicine’ discounted as little
more than quackery, but the emergence of some recent
drugs, such as reserpine from Rauwolfia serpentina
through the proper investigation of this long-standing
Indian native medicine, and other similar develop
ments, has done much to re-establish the credentials of
traditional medicines. Sub-Saharan Africa has pro
bably had far less attention devoted to its indigenous
plants and their uses than most of South Asia, South
East Asia and Latin America [Miller 1980].
Five substantial volumes of great detail about Sri
Lankan medicinal plants are a tribute to the wealth of
economic resources that are often overlooked and that
compilation of information provides a very com
mendable model [Jayaweera 1981-3]. There are some
important local economic collecting activities involving
the uncontrolled exploitation of unmanaged resources,
but so far in sub-Saharan Africa there have been few
systematic attempts to study and develop local
resources for medicinal use.’ A start was made in
Uganda, from about 1965-70, with the Natural
Chemotherapeutics Research Unit (with which I was
pleased to have a marginal involvement). In Senegal.
[Schissel 1984] a parallel attempt was made to that in
Uganda, but with half-hearted minimal support.
Local area studies of indigenous medicines have
appeared [Lindsay and Hepper 1978:Oliver !960]and
there is a network being established under the auspices
of the Ethiopian Pharmaceutical Association
[NAPRECA 1984] with the intention of trying to
' Since this was written Medicinal Plants m Tropica! A frica (19S6) by
Bep Oliver-Bevcr has been published
39
stimulate appropriate research and development
work, but there is still little evidence of any widespread
understanding among planners of the benefits that
could arise from such activity, still less the potential
scale of economic benefit by liberating sub-Saharan
Africa to a substantial extent from dependence on the
drugs industry of the North.
Even where economic activity is still recognised in the
collection of wild plant products, such as the Sudan
where the collection of gum Arabic is the second
largest foreign exchange earner in the country, this
industry and its product can be threatened when it
becomes convenient to the North to do so, both by
regulatory restrictions and the threat of synthetic
substitutes. If southern Africa could set its sights on
training its chemists and developing its chemical and
pharmaceutical industry to use indigenous resources
effectively, they would provide useful openings for the
seasonal economic exploitation of neglected biomass.
Stimulants
The well-fed North, adequately and often over
nourished throughout the year, regards year-round
adequacy of nutrition as the obvious goal of
nutritional planning. However, seasonal constancy in
diet and plane of nutrition should be regarded as very
much the abnormal situation in relation to man’s
place in time and space in the world eco-system. Much
more normal is a food calendar with periods of ample
nutrition separated by periods of malnutrition. The
biomass of the human population itself, as well as that
of game animals and domestic livestock, has a natural
periodicity. As an extension of this view, but one into
which I will not digress, would be the suggestion that
high infant and adult mortality as a periodic
phenomenon is also historically the norm. In almost
every society where there are substantial seasonal
changes in food availability, the use of appetite
suppressants, which divorce hunger from malnutrition
and allow hard work to be carried out while burning
reserves, has been commonplace. This has been an
alternative strategy, though sometimes carried out
parallel with food storage, to avoid the limitation of
nutritional seasonality.
Large numbers of plants are used around the world in
this way, but among the four best known which will
serve as examples here are betel nut from the Areca
palm throughout south-east Asia; khat, the chewed
leaves of Catha edu/is [NAPRECA 1984] in Arabia
and coastal eastern and central Africa; coca, the leaves
of Erythroxy/on supp. in the Andes, and Kola in West
Africa. Coca-Cola presumably recognised the value of
these last two species in its original formulation. The
beverage plants that we have taken into northern
culture arc from the same group of natural stimulants.
40
Cocoa and coffee were both used indigenously by
sucking or chewing the pulp around the ripe seeds as a
much simpler source of ‘pep’ before their alkaloids
were used and extracted in a more marketable and
now well-known form. Whatever the undesirable side
effects of concentrated extracts from any of these
traditionally exploited biomass species may be, it
ought to be recognised that the use of plants by man to
allow himself to adapt to the rigours of seasonal and
uncertain food supplies, is deeply culturally embedded
in our species.
Natural Resource Choices and Economic
Paradigms
Real investors who spend their own money, and even
those surrogates, the planners, who decide on the
spending of other’s money, are. as we all understand,
concerned for the quick buck. The net present value of
benefits must exceed the net present value of costs if
there is to be a high rate of return. I would need longer
to argue the point, but will now assert that to plan for
short-term benefit automatically biases planning
against long-term benefit. When Keynes said that ‘in
the long-run we are all dead’ he had not thought about
the evolutionary philosophy of'the selfish gene’. More
people recently have begun to consider the world
which their descendants will inherit, and to realise that
those who inhabit the earth today, even though soon
dead, have a moral obligation to the future. This
should lead us towards a new development philosophy
based on the net future, rather than net present
benefits, which might have startling consequences for
decision-making.
For example, anyone who has had the experience of
suggesting that from a resource point of view it might
be interesting to encourage the planting of trees as a
contribution to development, whatever economic
product may be in view, will have met the objection,
often insurmountable, of the relatively long time-lapse
before benefits begin to accrue. Anyone working on
lesser-known crops will have met objections that to
give attention to them instead of to crops in which
there is a strong research background is not feasible.
Both these views should be questioned and challenged
if we are to make an effective change of direction from
a development path which has not demonstrably
improved the human condition in sub-Saharan Africa.
Population Control in a Seasonal Environment
Dyson and Crook, in a very interesting contribution to
the 1978 conference [Chambers et al. 1981] drew
attention to the considerable degree of seasonality in
births and deaths. Their study did not, however, take
account of the probably substantial use made of plant
products for contraception, and even more
importantly, for securing abortion [see Fig. 5.1,
page 136]. Most studies on ethnobotany or ‘native
medicines’ include specific reference to large numbers
of species used for controlling fertility. Perhaps there
should be more sociological studies to identify the
circumstances and frequency with which such plants
are used, particularly whether their use is now
diminishing with the increasing movement away from
traditional cultural practices. Kokwaro (1976) for
example, lists no less than 28 species used in East
Africa for securing abortion. The distinction between
abortifacients and contraceptives is a subtle one that
need not detain us here. What is clear is that artificial
intervention to modify the birth-rate is a long-standing
practice. It would be interesting, in time, to learn
whether man has had a long history, hitherto
overlooked, of attempting to match population to
carrying capacity.
Article 42
[fa return to the natural balance is to be expected, a
‘drought and desertification control’ component in
particular must be incorporated into all agricultural
and rural development operations, such as:
1.
— the introduction of suitable techniques
aimed at increasing and maintaining the
productivity of agricultural land, arable land
and natural pastureland with a view to
controlling the various forms of erosion;
— the reclamation of land that has deteriorated,
by means of reafforestation or agricultural
land improvement, combined with main
tenance schemes involving, as far as possible,
the people and authorities concerned in
order to safeguard the progress made;
Conclusions and Suggestions
Of all the world species, man is perhaps the one who
has evolved to occupy the largest number of niches. It
is reasonable to assume that this success in colonisation
has been a result of his intelligence, which both enables
him to adapt to the food supplies that are available,
and only later to develop the distribution of food
supplies between niches, so as to exceed the carrying
capacity of each. Man’s ability to respond to climatic
seasonality within any broad geographical area will
have included migrations to follow the availability of
food which survives in nomadism, periodic fluctuations
in population in response to food resource and
disease, which continues in the disasters of today, but
perhaps above all, in the extraordinary range of food
species which he has learnt to use. At the present time
nomadism is increasingly unacceptable to politicians,
with forced migration, curiously, being regarded
occasionally as a political necessity which may be far
less humane. Massive natural fluctuations in popu
lation becomes increasingly unacceptable too as
modern communications media lead to its extent
being understood, by those areas where carrying
capacity is more stable, while at the same time we
create the means of extinguishing a large part of the
human race. The third historical factor of food
diversity we can, and should, encourage. Agricultural
research should be much more concerned to widen the
food base, in particular by making use of a greater
range of plant life forms as food resources.
If is encouraging that in the Third Lome Convention
signed recently (see The Courier.4 January 1985)
article 42 of the Convention is devoted to recommend
ations that are broadly in line with those suggested by
this article.
4 An official monthly publication of the European Community. The
January 1985 edition sets out the conclusions of the Third Lome
convention.
— extension of agro-forestry systems com
bining farming and forestry research and
development activities to produce plant
species that are more adapted to local
conditions;
2.
— the encouragement of measures to
economise on wood as an energy source by
stepping up research, application of, and
information on, new and renewable sources
of energy such as wind, solar and biomass
energy, and by the use of improved stoves
with a greater heat yield;
3.
— the development and management of
forestry resources by setting up at national
or regional level, forestry management plans
aimed at optimising the exploitation of
forestry resources;
4.
— the pursuit ofongoing campaigns to educate
the people concerned to be aware of the
phenomena of drought and desertification
and to train them in the possible ways of
controlling them.
The purpose of this Bulletin is to identify and sharpen
practical policy implications of the recognition of the
inevitable continuation of climatic fluctuation,
seasonal trend changes and massive unreliability, and
to point to practical measures that might ameliorate
their effect.
I.
Within the general terms of Article 42 of Lome 3, it
is now suggested that, rather than ‘agroforestry
systems combining farming and forestry research'
we should cease to make, as far as possible, the
traditional distinction between agriculture and
forestry. Specifically, we should put far more effort
into the silviculture of food.
41
2.
3.
We must recognise that the productivity of
agricultural land, under low rainfall, depends very
much more upon exploiting the diversity of life
forms adapted over millions of years to the
environment instead of basing so much of our
planning of food production on seed crops from
therophytes.
We should educate politicians and planners trained
in one set of environmental circumstances to learn
about and to understand more of the realities of the
ways in which man has come, through evolution, to
be able to live in other environments.
Going beyond the terms of Article 42, and more
contentiously, 1 believe we should recognise that a low
infant mortality and a low adult death rate detract
from the flexibility which has enabled human
population to survive in harsh areas through rapid
changes and responses in population to meet changes
in carrying capacity.
Very much greater attention should be given to
traditional medicines and social plant products and
the modernisation and potential improvement of their
use, rather than allowing or encouraging greater
dependency for health care on remote industry.
Finally, we should avoid setting our expectations of
what can be achieved by intervention far beyond any
reasonable possibility of success. As an alternative, we
might pay more attention to trying to avoid
interventions which have a high probability of making
matters worse.
References
Chambers. R., R. Longhurst and A. Pacey (cds.). 1981,
Seasonal Dimensions to Rural Poverty, Frances Pinter,
London
Lindsay. R. S. and F. N. Hepper, 1978. Medicinal Plants of
Marakwet. Kenya, Royal Botanic Gardens. Kew
Malan. J. S. and G. L. Owen-Smith, 1975, ‘The Ethnobotany
of Kaokoland’, Cimbebasia, vol 2 no 5, ppi31-78
Manning. H. L.. 1950, ‘Confidence limits of expected monthly
rainfall’. Journal of Agricultural Science 50. ppi 69-76
—1955, ‘The statistical assessment of rainfall probability and
application in Uganda agriculture’. Proceedings of the
Royal Society Bulletin 144. pp460-80
Miller. J. A.. 1980. ‘Chemical fruits of the desert’. Science
News 118, pl89
Montalembert, M. R. de. 1983. ‘Biomass resources of energy:
the critical issues', Ceres January-February. pp40-4
Nabhan. G. P. and R. S. Felger, 1980. ‘Deceptive barrenness.
The desert conceals food sources that prehistoric people
knew how to exploit. Will modern man do as well?’
Southwest Bulletin (New Mexico Solar Energy Association)
vol 5 no 4, ppl8-23 (Reprinted from Ceres, March-April
1976)
NAPRECA Newsletter(Natural Products Research Network
for Eastern and Central Africa). 1984, Supplement to vol 1
Special Issue: Focus on the ‘International Symposium on
Chemical and Ethnopharmacological Aspects of Chat
(Catha edulis)’. 15 December, 1984, Addis Ababa
Oliver-Bever. B., I960. Medicinal Plants m Nigeria, Nigerian
College of Ans, Science and Technology
Pirie. N. W., 1962. ‘Progress in biochemical engineering
broadens our choice of crop plants’. Economic Botany 15,
p302
Qureshi, M. Y., D. J. Pilbeam, C. S. Evans and E. A. Bell,
1977, ‘The Neurolathyrogen-amino-oxalylaminopropionic
acid in legume seeds’. Phytochemistry 16, p477
Sandford, S., 1983, Management of Pastoral Development in
theThird World, Overseas Development Institute, London
Dendy. D. A. V., B. Emmett and O. L. Oke, 1975, ‘Minor
food seeds’, in N. W. Pirie (cd.). Food Protein Sources,
Cambridge University Press
Schissel. H.. 1984, ‘The missing ingredient headache’. South,
November, p99
Irvine, F. R., 1952, ‘Supplementary and emergency food
plants of West Africa’. Economic Botany 6. pp23-40
Sivakumar, M. V. K., S. M. Virmani and S. J. Reddy
(undated). Rainfall Climatology of West Africa: Niger,
ICRISAT. Ouagadougou
Jayaweera, D. M. A., 1981-3, Medicinal Plants used in
Ceylon (5 vols) National Science Council of Sri Lanka
Jerome, N. W., R. F. Kandel and G. H. Pclto, 1980.
Nutritional Anthropology: Contemporary Approaches
to Diet and Culture, Redgrave. New York
Skene, M.. 1924, The Biology of Flowering Plants, Sidgwick
and Jackson, London
King, K. F. S. and M. T. Chandler, 1978, The Wasted
Lands, The Programme of work of ICRAF, Inter
national Council for Research in Agroforestry, Nairobi
Tallantire, A. C. and P. M. Goode, 1975, ‘A preliminary
study of the food plants of the West Nile and Madi Districts
of Uganda. The utilisation of leaves and fruits of local
and mainly indigenous plants in supplementing the staple
foods’. East African Journal of Agriculture and Forestry,
vol 40 no 3. pp233-55
Kokwaro, J. O.. 1976, Medicinal Plants of East Africa,
East African Literature Bureau, Nairobi
Trease, G. E. and W. C. Evans, 1978, (11th ed.) Pharma
cognosy. Bailliere Tindall, London
42
1
Walker, J. T. and D. A. Rijks, 1967, ‘A computer programme
for the calculation of coinfidencc limits of expected rainfall’.
Experimental Agriculture 3, pp337-41
Walsh, R., 1981, ‘The nature of climatic seasonality’, in
R. Chambers, R. Longhurst and A. Pacey (eds.). Seasonal
Dimensions to Rural Poverty, Frances Pinter, London
Wickens, G. E., J. R. Goodin and D. A Field. 1984, Plants
for Arid Lands, George Allen & Unwin, London
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43
Trees, Seasons and the Poor
Robert Chambers and Richard Longhurst'
The seasonal importance of trees to the poor is not. to
our knowledge, a subject which has received any
comparative analysis. In an earlier collection on
seasonal dimensions to rural poverty [Chambers,
Longhurst and Pacey 1981] there was no chapter on
trees, and the words ‘trees’, ‘forests', ‘wood’ or
‘fuelwood’ are not in the index. This neglect, while
unfortunate, can be understood as the outcome of
professional biases against trees and tree products as
they matter seasonally to the poor. Neglect of the poor
and of seasons needs no comment. Nor is the neglect of
trees in this context difficult to understand: foresters
have been most concerned with trees for timber in
commercial plantations or in protected forests,
[although this climate of opinion is changing; see, for
example, FAO 1985:2] and with keeping poor people
away.
Agricultural research and extension have concentrated
on private farming property and have been less
concerned with common lands where trees important
to the poor are often found; and in private farming
systems, professionals in, for example, agronomy,
animal husbandry and agricultural economics, notice
trees only peripherally. Even today, agroforestry
remains a fringe subject which falls between the
disciplines. More generally, outsiders’ perceptions of
how poor people contrive their livelihoods round the
year focus on the more obvious agricultural activities
of crop and livestock agriculture and tend to overlook
the diversity of their activities, especially outside the
main crop seasons. Where poor rural people’s use of
trees is not recognised, it is often seen negatively — as
a problem: of encroachment on forests, of cutting trees
for charcoal, of environmental degradation. When all
these biases interlock, it is scarcely surprising that the
seasonal importance of trees to poor rural people has
not been a central subject. Too easily, how poor
people use trees in their livelihood strategies has been
either ignored, or treated as a topic more suitable for
1 T he authors are grateful to Jim Redhead for comments, however,
the responsibility for the views expressed is theirs alone.
IDS Bulletin. 1986, vol 17 no 3. Institute of Development Studies. Sussex
44
dilettante social anthropology than for mainstream
professional concern.
Yet there is evidence that trees often play a major part
in the livelihood strategies of poor rural people.
Livelihoods here refer to the year-round levels of
wealth and of stocks and flows of food and cash which
poor rural people seek to provide for their physical
and social well-being, minimising risks and meeting
contingencies. The most conspicuous and important
activities to gain livelihoods are crop and animal
husbandry, and these are subject to seasonal peaks
and troughs, in activities, and in flows and the
resulting stocks. The problems of the lean season are
well known and well documented with a concurrence
during the rains and before harvest of low foodstocks,
high indebtedness, hard work, and disease; and in the
slack season after harvest there is often less to do and a
gap in productive activity. In practice, the many uses
of trees include helping poor people to mitigate these
problems.
The physical and biological basis for trees’ seasonal
contributions to livelihoods is both obvious and easy
to overlook. Therophytes12 (annuals yielding their crop
above the ground) dominate cultivation but are
shallow rooting, dependent on timely rainfall or
irrigation, and sharply timebound in the activities
(planting, weeding, transplanting, harvesting, etc.)
which they require. For their part, domestic livestock
require continuous attention, and especially feeding.
without which they soon waste and die. Phanerophytes
(perennial trees and shrubs) in contrast, have several
special characteristics. While there arc exceptions,
these include:
— deep rooting with access to moisture either all year
round, or for much more of the year than
therophytes, enabling them to transpire and
photosynthesise over longer periods, and to trap
and recycle deeper soil nutrients.
2 Sec pp 39 of this Bulletin for a further definition (Leakey).
— less precisely timebound activities, with leafing,
fruiting and seeding spread over longer periods
than therophytes,3 and with other products
including fuelwood available either at any time of
the year or over extended periods.
— accumulation of stocks, in the form of wood, over
periods of years, so that stinting in consumption
adds to future stock.
— environmental effects including shading, reducing
wind and soil erosion, and shielding against heavy
rain.
— demanding little attention once well established.
These characteristics are supplemented, according to
species, by others with seasonal significance in
complementing crop and animal husbandry, and in
supporting livelihoods at what would otherwise be
more difficult times of the year.
The diversities of trees and their phenologies, products
and uses, of environments in which trees and people
live, and of livelihood strategies, pose problems for
analysis and generalisation. The range of uses of trees
is so vast that only some of the seasonal aspectscan be
sketched here. The uses include timber, firewood and
poles. In addition, so-called ‘minor’ forest products of
commercial or consumption value include fruits,
berries, nuts, fodders, gums, resins, dyes, tannins,
medicines, wax, honey, insects, saps, soaps, poisons.
fibres, bamboos and canes, to mention but some. All
we can attempt here is a preliminary mapping of some
main features, with a few illustrations. Some of the
seasonal, or counterseasonal, contributions of trees to
the livelihoods of the poor can be presented under four
heads:
• micro-climatic effects
• slack and lean season food and fodder
• livelihood activities: smoothing peaks and
filling slacks
• meeting seasonal contingencies
Micro-climatic Effects
While the macro-level climatic effects of trees are a
matter of scientific controversy, the micro-level effects
are not. At the micro level, trees moderate climatic
extremes, with benefits for crops, livestock and human
beings. Scattered trees can have a similar effect to
shelter belts in reducing wind speed and moisture
losses.
Intercropping trees with therophytic crops can reduce
the crops’ yields through root competition, too much
1 For examples sec Taylor [1962:56] who shows the fruiting of four
savannah species. The shortest fruiting period is six weeks and the
longest six months.
shading, and in other ways, but can also improve and
stabilise yields, reducing losses in bad years. Alley
cropping (alternating lines of woody perennials and
annual ground crops) can provide leaf litter and
shading, humidity and other micro-climatic effects
which increase and/or stabilise crop yields in a
manner similar to other intercropping. Tree litter
slows the run-off of rain, protecting soils and
increasing infiltration of water. Through composting
and mulching, leaves can maintain soil fertility. Many
savanna trees are nitrogen fixing and their leaf litter
rots to provide nitrogen as well as to improve soil
structure c.g. Acacia spp. They are an important part
of the fallow.
Trees benefit livestock in tropical conditions by
reducing heat stress. The main processes of heat
exchange between animals and the environment are
through shortwave radiation (mainly input), long
wave radiation (mainly output) and convection.
Suitably shaped and leafed trees intercept shortwave
radiation from the sun, allow convection cooling by
the wind, and permit long wave radiation losses from
animals. The gains for animals include eating and
grazing for longer, needing less water, improving
conversion efficiency of fodder, improved repro
duction rates (independently of quality and quantity
of fodder available), and better growth rates, milk
yields and wool production [Robinson 1983:161-2],
The physical benefits of tree protection to humans
through shade from sun and shelter from rain and
wind arc well known. A survey in White Nile Province
in Sudan found that trees were most valued as a source
of fodder, but the second value was shade from the
summer's heat, which was put higher than both
domestic fuel4 and providing building poles and tool
handles [Anwar Abdu reported in Horowitz and Badi
1981:20]. Trees in paddy fields to give shade while
mothers transplant or weed are an important amenity
for small children. Following a rapid appraisal of trees
in paddy fields, a team from Khan Kaen University
concluded that ‘One of the primary uses of trees in
paddy fields in Thailand is as shade for humans and
livestock. In one of the hottest parts of a tropical
country like Thailand, this is not a trivial usage’
[Grandstaff er al, c. 1985]. The physiological impor
tance of shade and reduced heat stress for human
beings, especially in hot seasons, is so obvious that it
can be easily overlooked.
Slack and Lean Season Food and Fodder
The seasonality of tree food products and fodders
varies. Some are available in the wet season at the
same time as cultivated crops, some all the year round.
4 It is not known whether there was a male bias among respondents If
women collect fuel, they might place it higher than men would
45
and some in the lean period which includes the end of
the dry season and the early wet season. The latter two
seasonalities are of greatest interest here. In particular,
trees which provide food for people in the lean period.
and fodder for animals in the late dry and very early
wet seasons are especially beneficial for the poor.
The best known human foods from trees are fruits,
leaves, nuts, seeds, oils, and extracts like sago, besides
indirect foods like honey and insects. Most of these are
available only for certain periods in the year.
Fruiting periods vary in both duration and seasons.
According to tree type, fruiting periods can occur at
different times of the year and last for periods of one to
six months. Citrus such as orange and lime produce
mostly at the end of the rains and in the early part of
the dry season. Mango can produce its fruits at the
beginning of the rains. Uvilla (Pourouma cecropiaefolia) is a small tree of Brazil, Colombia and Peru
which provides a small fruit over three months of the
wet season. In areas of north India where three is no
second (rabi) harvest because of lack ofirrigation. ber
(Zizyphus spp) is another counterseasonal food. It
ripens from mid-February to mid-April when other
fruits arc in short supply. It is rich in vitamin C and
minerals [Sood et al, 1980]. Such tree products are
usually available in large amounts for relatively short
periods. Vitamin C, in which fruits are usually rich,
can be stored in the body to a limited degree, with a
carry-over of benefits beyond the time when fruits can
be eaten.
Besides fruits which are directly consumed, dry season
food is provided and prepared in a variety of other
ways. The locust bean (Parkia spp) is a perennial tree
legume food in Africa, Asia and South America; the
beans of the savannah species in West Africa
(P.clappertonia) mature in the dry season during
February-March and are fermented into the high
protein and fat food dawa dawa which is used as a soup
ingredient [Campbell-Platt 1980]. Dawa dawa also
stores well. Similarly the cashew nut (Anacardium
occidentale) provides edible nuts and fruits towards
the end of the dry season, the nuts having a high
content of oil. Baobab (Adansonia digitala') is an
important source of dietary calcium, available in
March (near the end of the Northern dry season). The
mongongo tree (Ricinodendron raulanenii} is a staple
food of the Basarwa (Bushmen) in the Kalahari in
Botswana [Lee 1973], The mongongo year begins in
April at the end of the wet season with the fall of fruits
which are harvested until September. The fruits are
prepared by steaming and peeling, and are then
cooked to separate the flesh from the nuts. The flesh is
then eaten and the nuts are roasted and cracked.
Other tree foods are available all year round or can be
stored. The oil palm (Elaeis guineensis) provides oil
46
which is a valuable source of vitamin A and energy in
West Africa. Plants start to yield three to four years
from transplanting and crop throughout the year,
reaching a peak in the early rains. Palm wine is also a
part of the diet to varying degrees. The sago palm
(Mctroxylon spp) provides a secure food source yearround for the poor in parts of South East Asia and
Oceania: though a poor source of nutrients, it is a good
source of energy, and complemented with fish and
wild leafy vegetables can provide a satisfactory diet
[Ulijaszek 1983], Food availability over an extended
period can also be achieved through ‘storage’ of some
fruits or trees, or picking and drying them for storage
in the home. Nuts such as those of the mongongo can
also be stored.
Finally, perennial and seasonal tree foods are a fall
back in bad years and famines. Fruits, nuts, seeds, and
berries can all serve this function. Several examples are
given in this Bulletin, such as Boscia senega/ensis in
Mali (Toulmin). In Tanzania. Newman (1975) has
shown how two or three tree species provide food for
every month of the year. Their use intensifies during
famine, an observation impressively documented for
Swaziland by Ogle and Grivetti (1985).
Trees contribute to animal fodder in two ways:
indirectly, through effects on the underlying pasture
and directly through leaves, pods and fruits. In
savanna conditions where trees are not too dense,
there can be beneficial indirect effects where grasses in
the understory of trees start growing earlier and
continue growing for longer, spreading the period of
availability. The quality of pasture may also be better
over a longer period: the digestibility of grasses
decreases with maturity, so any factor such as reduced
light and/or temperature under trees which shows
growth and delays flowering is likely to improve
pasture quality [Robinson 1985:158]. There are also
direct effects through the counterseasonal supplies of
tree fodders. In parts of Rajasthan, dry season fodder
is provided by the dried leaves of the Khejri tree,
Prosopis cineraria, which is grown in an agroforestry
combination on cultivated fields: after the ground
crop harvest, the trees are harvested by lopping, and
the leaves stored and fed to animals and sometimes
sold, throughout the dry season. Perhaps the best
known example is Acacia albida which flowers and
fruits to drop its pods in the late dry season and shed
its nutrient-rich leaves early in the wet season [Teel
1984:61 ]. In West Africa, A.albida is intercropped with
sorghum and millet which it does not significantly
shade during the wet season and the pods and leaves
provide good fodder for goats and cattle at a time of
dry season scarcity. In Western Darfur in Sudan.
seasonal cattle migration exploits the A.albida in the
alluvial valley bottoms, with the unusual result that
more protein is available to animals in the mid to late
dry season than at other times [Wilson etal, 1980:12930]. The list could be lengthened. Suitable multi
purpose trees which provide counterseasonal fodder
can often improve animal nutrition and performance.
One gain is stronger animals for land preparation for
cultivation when the rains come, otherwise a time
when draught animals are undernourished and weak.
Livelihood Activities: Smoothing Peaks and
Filling Troughs
Crop activities in tropical agriculture usually have
sharp peaks and long troughs, especially but not only
with unimodal rainfall. The peaks are often tightly
time-bound especially for land preparation, planting,
transplan ting (with rice), weeding and harvesting. The
peaks in labour demand often constrain production
and are also periods of stress for children, women and
men. Yield losses also follow untimely or incomplete
performance of operations. Measures which reduce or
spread peak labour demands or which fill troughs with
productive or remunerative activity, will variously
reduce stress and improve livelihoods. Trees can and
do contribute to both.
The stress of peak labour demands can be eased in
several ways. If trees are intercropped with agricultural
crops, total production including the trees may
increase but agricultural crop production may
decrease, reducing the total peak labour demand for
the crop; and activities like weeding may be reduced
through a ground cover of leaf litter and through
shading. When work leaves no time for cooking,
families can rely on foods such as mangoes [Hoskins
1985]. If firewood has to be collected, it can be stocked
in the dry season so that it does not require work
during the crop season. If tree fodders are collected for
animals, they can either be stored, or, as occurs in the
foothills of the Himalayas, fodder trees on common
land can be used during labour slack periods and
fodder trees close by on the farm reserved for times of
peak labour demand or other stress, such as rice
transplanting.
Perhaps more important to poor people, though, are
the opportunities for productive and remunerative
activity in the slack dry seasons and in bad years which
trees so often provide. These take many forms and
yield many products. The use of bamboos for making
baskets and other containers and the role of Acacia
nilotica in providing all the tannin on which the West
African leather industry is traditionally based are just
two examples. But perhaps the most widespread
activities are with firewood and charcoal. These are
easier to collect, prepare and transport in dry seasons.
Research and writing on rural energy have been more
concerned with them as problems — of supply and
cost for urban people, of time and energy expenditure
for rural women, and of environmental degradation
— than as opportunities for rural incomes and
livelihoods. Yet in most places fuelwood and charcoal
prices, and so potential benefits to producers,
transporters and sellers, have been rising compared
with food. Firewood collection and charcoal pre
paration have been seen as problems to be controlled
rather than means of livelihood to be encouraged and
developed. But for many poor rural people they are
not only a major source of slack, dry season
livelihood, but also one which has become potentially
more remunerative.
Historically, a long transition is taking place from
trees as common or free access resources, to trees as
private property. Charcoal burning in Mbeere in
Kenya is a well researched and documented case which
may be typical of this transition in many other parts of
the world. In Mbeere in the latter 1970s, Brokensha
and Riley (1977,1978) found that producing charcoal
was regarded as a sign of poverty: in a small survey of
35 charcoal sellers, all but one were characterised as
poor people. Nearly all had entered the business to get
money to buy food or to pay school fees, and many
had started burning charcoal in desperation during a
famine in which their crops had failed (in an area
where the records showed that six out of ten rainy
seasons produced inadequate harvests). Charcoal
production increased during any food shortage and
was concentrated in the dry season [Brokensha and
Riley 1977:19],
In Mbeere, as elsewhere accessible to roads, the better
species were being rapidly cut out, while land
adjudication and allotment removed trees from the
common domain, reducing the opportunities for poor
people to supplement their dry season livelihoods
through charcoal burning. With such a transition, the
opportunities shift from common or free access trees
to trees on private farms: farmers near Kano in
northern Nigeria, for example, lop branches from the
trees on their land during the dry season and take them
on donkeys to Kano to sell returning with town refuse
for farm manure [Foley and Barnard 1984:56]. But
whether with earlier common or free access to trees, or
later with private trees, the cutting, preparing,
transporting and selling firewood and charcoal remain
important counterseasonal activities for dry periods
which dovetail nicely with wet season cultivation.
Meeting Seasonal Contingencies
Trees which can be cut and sold are good savings
banks and insurance for poor rural people [Chambers
and Leach 1986J. They can be used to raise money to
deal with contingencies, especially through sale of
firewood, timber and charcoal. Trees can also
sometimes be pledged or mortgaged. In India they are
47
even beginning to be used as security for consumption
loans from banks (personal communication, Aloysius
Fernandez).
M aggie M u rray/F o rm at
Contingencies occur at any time of the year but tend to
concentrate in the lean and difficult seasons. In
tropical conditions, sickness is often most prevalent in
the rains, especially with malaria, diarrhoeas, dengue
fever, guinea worm disease, skin infections, and
snakebite. Deaths and funerals are more common
then, and funerals can require considerable sudden
outlays. The lean season of the rains is, moreover, the
time of greatest food shortage and indebtedness. To
cut and sell firewood or timber, to make and sell
charcoal, or to sell or mortgage standing trees, is
usually easier in the dry season, not least because of
wet season demands on labour for cultivation and
problems of communications and transport, but the
demand for firewood may be higher in the rains. An
example, though tragic, from Bangladesh shows how
even small young trees can help a desperate family
through a seasonal bad time. In their book Quiet
Violence [1983.160-167] Betsy Hartmann and James
Project to plant trees. Central region of Burkina Faso.
48
Boyce recount the trials and tribulations of a landless
family — Abu. Sharifa and their six children. They
had suffered a long impoverishing sequence, ending by
mortgaging and selling their wooden bed, cow,
plough, land and finally Sharifa’s earrings and gold
nose pin. to meet pressing needs. Out of food, in debt,
with creditors pressing for repayment at sowing time
when cash and food were short, and needing money to
buy seed to plant on sharecropped land, Abu cut down
first the young mango tree, and then the young
jackfruit tree on their tiny plot and sold the wood and
roots for rice.
Trees in Seasonal Strategies
In practice, then, trees do play a part in the seasonal
strategies of poor rural people, adding diversity and
security to their repertoires and resources for gaining
livelihoods round the year. Further analysis may well
show that trees are often of special significance in
easing or accentuating the seasonal burdens of
women, especially with firwood and fodder collection.
As they emerge from this evidence, trees seasonally
stabilise, protect and support the life and livelihoods
of the rural poor. They stabilise microclimates and
production. They protect physically against the
climate and against excessive labour peaks, and
socially and economically against contingencies. And
they support livelihoods with time-flexible activities
which can be fitted into other demands. With the
gradual loss of common and free access trees, the
onwership of trees by the poor assumes greater
importance so that such benefits can be retained and
enhanced.
special efforts to involve women. As always, analysis
starts best not with the preconceptions of outsiders,
but with the needs and priorities of the rural poor
themselves. And the categories and conclusions of this
article must themselves be subject to correction by
those rural people who use, or might in future use,
trees in their seasonal strategies for survival and
livelihood.
Perhaps the most important policy implication is local
diagnosis to access seasonal links between trees and
different groups of poor rural people, and to identify
potentials. Possible interventions for counterseasonal
benefits for the poor from trees include:
Brokcnsha, David and Bernard Riley, 1977, ‘Vegetation
changes in Mbeerc Division, Embu’, Working Paper
No 319, Institute for Development Studies, University of
Nairobi, September
— the transfer of suitable multipurpose trees to new
environments to fill gaps and slacks. Experience
from several countries suggests that rural people’s
overriding concern is with multipurpose trees and
not for fuel (firewood and charcoal) alone,
important though this is especially where there are
markets for it [FAO 1985];
— vesting rights of ownership and use of trees,
whether in forests or on common land, in landless
and small farming families;
— planting trees on household plots and small farms;
— tie-ridging and other microcatchment water
harvesting and concentrating for trees in semi-arid
and arid conditions;
— developing agroforestry and agro-pastoral systems
with demand for labour and flows of products
better spread around the year.
The diagnostic method need not be complicated. It
will best start with current onwership, access and uses
of trees by the poor. The Diagnosis and Design
methodology developed by John Raintrec and others
at ICRAF (The International Council for Research in
Agroforestry, Nairobi) is on these lines. It starts off
from household supply problems such as food, fuel,
shelter, raw materials for household industry, cash,
and savings and investment and then asks how they
are met and how trees introduced into farming systems
might help households meet them better. This is called
the ‘basic needs’ approach for description and
diagnosis of household production systems [Raintree
and Young 1983:12]. FAO has begun to collect
research on fruit-bearing forest species and has
initiated research on local needs for trees. ICRAF is
generating a data base on multipurpose trees.
Diagnosis by the poor themselves and their knowledge
of trees and their uses are an important element, with
References
—1978, ‘Forest, foraging, fences and fuel in a marginal area
of Kenya’, paper for USAID Africa Bureau Firewood
Workshop, Washington DC. 12-14 July
Campbell-Platt, G.. 1980. ‘African locust bean (Parkta spp)
and its West African fermented food product, dawa dawa'.
Ecology offood and Nutrition, vol 9, ppl23-32
Chambers. Robert, Richard Longhurst and Arnold Pacey
(eds.), 1981. Seasonal Dimensions to Rural Poverty,
Frances Pinter, London
Chambers, Robert and Melissa Leach, 1986, ‘Trees to meet
contingencies: savings and insurance for the rural poor',
IDS, Sussex (mimeo)
FAO, 1985, ‘Tree growing by rural people' FAO Forestry
Paper 64, Rome
Foley, Gerald and Geoffrey Barnard, 1984, Farm and Com
munity Forestry, Earthscan Technical Report No. 3,
International Institute for Environment and Development.
London
Grandstaff, Somluckrat, Terry Grandstaff. Pagarat Rathakette, David Thomas and Jureerat Thomas, c.1985.
‘Trees in Paddy Fields in Northeast Thailand’, forthcoming
in Gerald G. Marten (ed.). Traditional Agriculture tn
Southeast Asia: A Human Ecology Perspective, WestviewPress. Boulder (Co)
Hartmann. Betsy and James Boyce. 1983, .4 Quiet Violence:
View from a Bangladesh Village, Zed Press, London
Horowitz, M. and K. Badi. 1981, Sudan: Introduction of
Forestry in Grazing Systems, FAO. Rome
Hoskins, M.. 1985,‘The promise in trees’. Food and Nutrition
11, pp44-6
Lee, R., 1973,‘Mongongo: the ethnology of a majorwild food
resource’. Ecology of Food and Nutrition vol 2, pp3O7-21
Newman. J. L.. 1975, ’Dimensions of Sandawe Diet’, Ecology
of Food and Nutrition, vol 4. pp33-9
49
Ogle. B. and L. Grivetti, 1985, ‘Legacy of the chameleon:
edible wild plants in the kingdom of Swaziland, Southern
Africa. A cultural, ecological, nutritional study. Part IV —
nutritional analysis and conclusions’. Ecology ofFood and
Nutrition vol 17, pp41-64
Raintree, J. B. and A. Young, 1983, Guidelines for
Agroforestry Diagnosis and Design, International Council
for Research in Agroforestry, Nairobi. November
Robinson, Patrick, 1983, ‘The role of silvopastoralism in
small farming systems', in D. A. Hoekstra and F. M.
Kuguru (eds.). Agroforestry Systems for Small-Scale
Farmers, Proceedings of an ICR AF/BAT Workshop held in
Nairobi in September 1982, International Council for
Research on Agroforestry, Nairobi, ppi47-69
Sood, D..D. Waglc. H. Naina* alee and H. Srivastava. 1980.
‘Quality attributes of some Ber (Zizyphus jujube) strains.
Indian Journal of Nutrition and Dietetics vol 17, pp447-51
Taylor, Charles J., 1962. Tropical Forestry, with particular
reference to West Africa. Oxford University Press, London
Teel. Wayne, 1984, 4 Pocket Directory of Trees and Seeds in
Kenya, Kengo, Nairobi
Ulijaszek, S.. 1983. ‘Palm Sago (Metroxylon spp) as a sub
sistence crop’. Journal of Plant Foods vol 5, ppi 15-34
Wilson. R. T.. Liz Bailey, J. Hales, D. Moles and A. E.
Watkins, 1980, ‘The cultivation-cattle complex in Western
Dafur’. Agricultural Systems vol 5, ppi 19-35
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Developments in social accounting
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Seasonality in a Savanna District of Ghana - Perceptions of Women and
Health Workers
Gil! Gordon
These notes on seasonality arise from a rapid rural
appraisal carried out for UNICEF in the Dangbe
district of Ghana in July and August 1984. The
appraisal focused on UNICEF’s GOBI-FFF1 strategy
and addressed the following questions:
— What do mothers know and do about growth
monitoring, diarrhoea, breastfeeding and weaning,
immunisation and family planning? How have they
adapted their practices to changing economic and
household situations and to new knowledge?
— What do health workers know and do about the
GOBI-FFF activities? How is their ability to
implement the strategy affected by the economic
situation in Ghana?
— What is the potential for individuals and organi
sations in the community to become involved in
GOBI activities?
— What other important interventions are required to
enable parents to protect the health and growth of
their children?
Methodology
Data were collected from a variety of sources. Resource
constraints often made it necessary to share transport
with health workers and to hold group discussions
with women gathered at clinics all over the district,
rather than in a random selection of villages.
However, several villages from each of three types
were visited and over a half of the women in group
meetings were attending the clinic for the first time.
Seventy-four mothers of pre-school children were
interviewed in their homes using a semi-structured
questionnaire. Questions covered the occupations of
household members; who provided most of the food
for the children; problems with farming and trading
1 GOBI-FFF is an acronym for growth monitoring, oral rehydralion.
breastfeeding, immunisation, food supplements, family planning
and female education. UNICEF has identified these as priority
activities for improving child survival and development globally.
and how these might be tackled; strategies for
managing childcare and work, changes in childrearing
since their mothers' generation and reasons for these
changes.
Discussions were held with 15 groups of women,
ranging in age from 18 to 60 years, in 10 villages. A
check list of questions was used to stimulate
discussion, which was recorded. The optimal number
of women was 15 to 20, although it was sometimes
difficult to exclude other women who wanted to join
the group. Larger groups made it difficult to keep to
the point and give everyone a chance to talk. Men were
excluded because they invariably dominated the
discussion, criticised women’s contributions and
attributed their problems to ignorance and negligence
rather than resource constraints. Focus group
discussions lasted for at least an hour and often longer
because requests for information were responded to
fully, and issues explored further as they arose.
Health workers at district and village level were
interviewed individually and in small groups.
Health service statistics were analysed from child
welfare climes, outpatient departments, community
clinics and hospital admissions.
Seventy-five mothers attending the malnutrition clinic
were interviewed to elicit their views on the reasons for
the child's poor growth and their socio-economic
situation.
Setting
The economy of Ghana has been deteriorating since
the 1970s. In 1982 a four year recovery plan was drawn
up, financed by a conditional IMF loan. 1983 was a
year of severe hardship and hunger, due to a
combination of factors — drought, bush fires, the
influx of one million Ghanaians from Nigeria, petrol
shortages and a reduction in the electricity supply
caused by falling levels in the Volta Lake. In June,
IDS Bulletin, 1986. vol 17 no 3. Institute of Development Studies. Sussex
COMMUNITY HEALTH CECL
47/1. (First Hoot/ St. Marks Bead,
Bangalore - 560 C01._______
Fig- 1
Map of Dangbe District
coconuts, groundnuts and water became the staple
foods and jokes were made about ‘Rawlings necklace’,
the protruding collar-bones of even those professionals
who could not find a way to leave the country. The
price of food rocketed, and emergency food aid was
brought in until August 1984. Normal seasonal
fluctuations in food prices were no longer relevant as
staggering rises occurred from week to week as prices
were allowed to find their own level.
Dangbe district has a population of around 70,000
with a maletfemale ratio of 100:110. The district lies in
the coastal Savanna belt, with a bimodal rainfall
pattern, from March to July and September to
October. There are three main types of villages in the
district:
— coastal villages, where the men fish and the women
smoke the fish for sale. Cassava, tomatoes and
shallots are grown in the sandy soils.
— inland villages on lagoons or on the Volta River,
with sandy soils. Fishing and the cultivation of
cassava, tomatoes, sugar cane and shallots are the
main occupations.
— inland villages in the north of the district where
groundnuts, beans, maize, pepper and tomatoes
are grown in the more fertile soils.
The Household Economy
Forty-eight per cent of the households visited were
headed by women, the majority because the husband
lived in another town, or with another wife. In these
households, the women provided most or all of the
food for her children. In the other households, the
contributions of members to the food supply, and the
strategy employed to ensure survival depended on the
season and the ecology of the village. The majority of
women aim to farm and trade, but deteriorating soils,
unreliable rainfall, a lack of agricultural inputs and
plant disease, makes trading a more attractive option.
In the preharvest season the majority of women would
invest extra cash in their trades. They were extremely
interested in ways to acquire credit. One group said
that it was difficult to run an informal credit scheme
where women paid in a fixed sum each month, because
at certain times of the year women would be unable to
pay. During the clearing season, more women may
have preferred to invest money in tractor hire,
fertilizer and seed.
In coastal villages men catch the fish and women
purchase it from them through an agent. The women
then smoke the fish and sell it using the profits to feed
themselves and their children. The supply of fish is
affected by the season and the activities of trawlers
from the USSR and other countries further out to sea.
When the sea is rough the fishermen stay at home. Fish
catches decline in the dry season and families move up
the coast to Lome or Tema to follow the fish.
According to the community clinic attendants (CCA),
many children return from these journeys with
malnutrition and infections, because they have lived in
temporary accommodation with poor quality care.
An improved fish smoker has enabled women to
increase their profits by reducing firewood con
sumption and improving the quality of the product.
The smoker improves fuel efficiency by increasing the
capacity of the oven, which means that groups of
women need to pool their baskets of fish in order to
utilise the extra capacity, particularly in times of
seasonal shortages. Dangbe women appear to be
willing to cooperate in this way, but a group of Ewe
women admitted that they were too competitive and
mistrustful to work together. When fish became
scarce, men could command exorbitant prices because
‘if one woman refused to pay, another was ready to
jump in and pay even more’. In a village further along
the coast, the improved smokers were often
underutilised because of inadequate fish supplies.
Seasonally of supplies and migration need to be taken
into account when new processing technologies are
introduced. Inadequate supplies of raw materials,
related to season, are a major problem with improved
food processing technologies in Ghana [ILO 1984],
and result in new equipment being overcapitalised and
underutilised.
Wasakuse is an inland village on a lagoon, with sandy
soils. Women aim to farm and trade in order to
maintain a constant source of food and cash. Several
years of droughts and deteriorating soils are severely
limiting their economic opportunities. The cassava,
tomatoes and shallots were clearly failing by the end of
July 1984. The water level in the lagoon had sunk so
low that fishing was no longer viable and the women
could not fry fish for sale. The sale of pigs and goats
was the only source of income and disease had
undermined even this. Women thought that around
half the families in the villages would migrate out of
the district northwards to the forest belt around
Akosombo to farm by the end of August. They would
live in temporary shelters, remote from health care.
and the women expected this to have a negative effect
on the growth and health of young children.
Further north, farmers grow a mixture of crops, often
maize, cassava, beans, groundnuts, tomatoes and
peppers. During the preharvest season, the women's
trading activities support the household. After the
harvest, the husband may contribute a larger amount
of food from his farm. Men have greater access to
tractors for clearing, fertiliser and land. They are more
likely to belong to a farmers’ association and see an
53
extension officer. However, trading in the preharvest
season is competitive and time-consuming. Purchasing
power in the community is low, many women sell the
same commodity, and supplies of raw materials, for
example, maize, are expensive and difficult to obtain.
Kcnkey2 sellers in one village formed an association to
buy maize cheaply in bulk and ensure a regular supply.
Many other women traders expressed a need for credit
which would enable them to secure supplies of raw
materials for their trade.
Seasonality and Primary Health Care
Primary healthcare is expanding rapidly in Ghana in
the form of community clinics. These are staffed by
community clinic attendants (CCAS) usually young
male farmers from the village. They are expected to
treat patients at the clinic and promote healthy
behaviour in the village on a part-time basis, for a
salary of around C600. ’ (A doctor’s salary is C1,500.)
The salary comes from the sale of drugs to patients.
administered by the village health committee.
The CCAs had several problems with their work,
which would exacerbate in the farming season. They
complained that health activities were seriously
interfering with their farming. Not only attending to
patients but the many journeys to Ada Foah for
supplies and advice was time-consuming. Moreover,
demand for curative care was at its peak in the rainy
season when farmers tasks were not pressing.
Income accruing from the sale of drugs was precarious
because people had no spare cash at this time of year
and often promised to pay later. Also, the health
committee functioned poorly or ceased altogether as
members migrated or became overwhelmed with their
own concerns. Drug supplies and payment became
unreliable.
The financial advantage to many CCAs clearly lay in
the farm rather than the clinic. Several CCAs
requested bicycles to enable them to return to the
clinic earlier from their distant farms.
The CCAs are expected to be part-time health workers
but in fact those employed by the Ministry of Health
are also obliged to supplment their inadequate income
with farming, trading, private practice or donated
foods. If many health workers farm, they will also be
unwilling to work a full day attending to the extra
numbers of patients at the clinics. They will be most
tempted to appropriate aid foods when foods arc
scarce and expensive in the local markets, at the time
when they are most needed by their malnourished
clients.
•' Kenkcy is a fermented boiled maize product eaten as a main meal
with fish.
’ 56 Cedis = £1.00.
54
Seasonality and GOBI
Growth Monitoring
At present growth monitoring, advice on breastfeeding
and weaning, and immunisations are offered at
Maternal and Child Health (MCH) Clinics in 16
locations, once a month. Food supplements are also
given to selected mothers, according to criteria laid
down by the Catholic Relief Services (CRS), which
change from time to time. Treatment for diarrhoea is
available at any time from the community clinic or the
health post, but not the MCH Clinic.
The costs and benefit of clinic attendance as perceived
by the mother are likely to vary seasonally. In the rainy
season, women are busy with trading and farming, and
this may involve travelling for a period of time. Money
for fares and fees is scarce. With high costs, the
benefits must be worthwhile. Women said that a good
chance of a reasonable amount of desirable food was
the most attractive benefit offered by the clinics in the
hungry season. Mothers and health workers agreed
that it would not be worth attending the clinic for
weighing and advice only because most mothers were
aware of their child’s progress and needs.
Thirty-nine per cent of the children attending the
malnutrition clinic had never attended before, and
over 60 per cent of these had mothers who had
migrated to Asosombo, or travelled long distances
with their work. Twelve per cent of the malnourished
children had not been weighed for several months
before reporting to the clinic. (This means that
malnutrition had not been prevented by growth
monitoring in half of the children.) Several of the
migrant motherssaid that they had returned to attend
the clinic because of their concern over the child's poor
growth and failure to respond to treatment away from
home. The question is whether they could be helped to
monitor their child's progress more efficiently in order
to pick up faltering growth earlier while they are out of
contact with the clinic, and also, whether they could
afford to respond to smaller monthly fluctuations in
weight, given the needs of the rest of the family.
Seasonal variations in weight for age should have
shown up in the monthly statistics collected for CRS.
Accra. Unfortunately, these data are not kept at
district level for local use. and, CRS rejected five out of
12 months in the previous year as unreliable. Two few
deliveries were carred out at health units to analyse
seasonal trends in birthweight.
However, there is plenty of anecdotal evidence from
health workers and focus groups that seasonal stress
has an important effect on nutritional status. CCAs,
nurses and mothers said that children returning from
seasonal migration along the coast and northwards
present with malnutrition and infections because of
poor quality care and rough conditions. The hungry
season, when palmnuts, groundnuts and fish are
scarce, was a time of poor growth in children.
In Wasakuse women said ‘in the season of plenty,
children cat fish stew every day and grow well. In the
lean season there is not much of anything and
everyone must eat pepper with their cassava.
Whatever their age, there is no discrimination, then,
the children stop growing’. Numbers attending, the
malnutrition clinic increased over the rainy season in
1984, partly because of a lack of food, and partly
because of the sequel to a measles epidemic.
Oral Rehydration
Death from diarrhoea can be prevented if children are
given plenty of fluids as soon as the diarrhoea starts,
and treated with oral rehydration solution (ORS) al
the first sign of dehydration. Carers can be taught to
make up a solution using salt and sugar, or use a
UNICEF sachet of ORS at home.
Seasonal trends in the incidence of diarrhoea did not
show up in health service statistics, but one would
expect more cases to occur in the rainy season. It is
important to teach everyone responsible for daily
childcare, whether grandmother, mother, daughter or
migrant mother, to make up and give rehydration
fluid correctly at the first sign of diarrhoea. If the
mother does not have time to sit with the child offering
sips of fluid, the carer must do it. If migrant families
are far from a health unit, they need to carry theirown
supply of sachets or salt and sugar. People need to
recognise signs that the child is becoming dehydrated
in spite of the fluid and that they must seek more help.
Breastfeeding and Women
Women individually and in groups described how
breastfeeding and weaning practices have changed
since their mothers’ generation. Children arc now
given supplementary foods, particularly maize gruel,
much earlier, and breastfeeding stops earlier. Only
six percent of the mothers practised the exclusive
breastfeeding recommended by UNICEF for the first
four months of life, and 22 per cent had introduced
pap before the child was one month old. Individual
mothers stated that they personally had given a
particular child pap at two weeks because it was not
satisfied with breastmilk only. In the focus groups.
many women laughed at this reason, and said that
women in general gave pap early because they were
anxious to return to their trading and farming. They
wanted the child to become less dependent as soon as
possible. One group of health workers also believed
that the very short rest women were able to lake after
delivery, anxiety, lack of traditional support from
men, and a poor quality diet were resulting in a decline
in breastmilk production.
If this economic explanation of early supplements is
correct or partially correct, one can expect seasonal
stress to exacerbate the problem, when women are
anxious to start work at their farms and trades.
One of the CCAs advises mothers to take their young
children with them to the farm with an older sibling.
They can make shades against the sun, and feed them
on the farm. Some women and health workers give a
different explanation for the earlier supplements and
cessation of breastfeeding. They believe that mothers
have learnt about breastmilk substitutes — beverages,
homemade weaning mixes, baby foods — through the
health service, the media, school and travel. They are
aware that they do not have to be glued to the baby day
and night for months, that there are alternatives which
free a mother from total responsibility for feeding.
This knowledge of breastmilk substitutes also enables
these mothers to contemplate weaning at one year
rather than waiting for two or three years as their
mothers did.
Unfortunately, the extent to which mothers are able
adequately to substitute for breastmilk depends on the
time, cash and foods at their disposal. As one woman
said ’the poorest mothers are under the most pressure
to go back to work early, work long hours, travel, and
wean the child. But they are the least able to afford
good breastmilk substitutes’.
Health workers advise mothers to add fish powder or
groundnut paste to the maize pap. and sell packets of
fish powder at the clinics. Mothers appreciated the
convenience of this, but in the hungry season the price
offish rose so steeply that the sales had to stop. (Other
programmes involved in marketing weaning food
have run into similar problems with seasonal scarcities
of raw materials, at a time when the weaning foods are
most needed.) Health workers at one health centre
finally stopped giving advice on feeding to mothers
because they themselves could not afford to buy the
food for their own children.
The majority of women continue to breastfeed for
around 18 months, but the loss of a source of high
quality protein and fat will be felt, particularly in the
hungry season. Nineteen per cent of the children
attending the malnutrition clinic were cared for by the
grandmother or aunt because their mother had
migrated. These children had been weaned at around
one year, and were reported to be miserable, anorexic
and frequently sick. If their mothers were pushed into
leaving the district by seasonal stress, this would
further add to the problems of the child and guardian
because food would be scare and the guardian busy.
55
A further 19 per cent of the children at the clinic had
mothers who travelled frequently with their work.
Again, the hungry season would be a time when
mothers were under pressure to travel while
conditions were least favourable for the child at home.
Seasonal Patterns of Disease and Immunisation
Statistics from the outpatient department at Ada Foah
Health Centre did not show any seasonal trends.
Malaria is endemic in the district, and accounts for
more outpatient visits, hospital admissions and deaths
than any other disease.
There are epidemics of measles and whooping cough,
but these arc not reflected in outpatient statistics
because the clerks record symptoms rather than
diseases. Measles might be entered as fever, diarrhoea,
cough or rashes depending on the mother’s initial
complaint.
Mothers who are aware that immunisation is
sometimes available at the MCH Clinic are more likely
to attend when cases of measles or whooping cough
increase in the area, or at times when epidemics are
known to occur. At this time the risks to the child of
catching a severe illness are perceived to outweigh the
risks of acquiring an abscess of hepatitis from an
unsterilised needle, or of ‘catching another disease,
which one can't afford to treat’ at the clinic. A measles
epidemic had occurred at the beginning of the 1984
rainy season, when women were least able to spare
lime from planting.
Malnutrition was associated with measles, whooping
cough or diarrhoea in 63 per cent of the children
attending the malnutrition clinic, and 72 per cent of
the malnourished children seen in the home.
Respiratory tract infections also increase during the
rainy season.
Policy Implications
Seasonal stress emerges as an important dimension
both in primary health care and in the ability of
women to manage their economic and reproductive
roles in Dangbe district. Although specific questions
on seasonality were not asked, groups of women and
health workers repeatedly brought the topic up in
discussion.
The impact of seasonality, and therefore the policy
implications, vary with the type of village. Children in
coastal and inland or riverside villages with sandy soils
appear to be at high risk of malnutrition because many
families are obliged to migrate. Children in inland
villages with more fertile soils do not have to cope with
the stress of migration.
56
This rapid appraisal provides some pointers to
seasonal stresses, but development workers within the
district need to study these with the community in
greater depth, and then look for ways of reducing this
impact or at least of protecting child health wherever
possible. This study would involve discussion with
groups in the different types of village, using a check
list of questions which might include the following:
— which families migrate and why?
— do families migrate in groups?
— where do migrant families live, what do they eat,
what health services do they use, and what
problems do they encounter?
— what are the reasons for many children becoming
thin and sick when they migrate?
After analysis of the problems, groups would go on to
look for ways to improving the situation. These might
include:
— measures which reduce the need to migrate: for
example, irrigation; fish ponds; crop varieties
suited to dry sandy soils; improved small animal
husbandry; action to enhance soil fertility; credit
technology and marketing to increase women’s
trading profits: dry season gardens.
— measures to improve living conditions for migrant
families.
— measures to protect the health of young children.
For example:
— immunise children before they migrate;
— teach parents how to give coconut water or
prepare oral rehydration solution and supply
ORS sachets;
— make antimalarials available;
— teach someone in each group to weigh or
measure children;
— discuss ways of best preparing a diet suitable for
young children;
— encourage families to seek out and use the
nearest health facilities.
Further discussion and study is needed on the
operation of the primary health care programme in
relation to season. The conflicts of interests between
farming and health work need a serious response
otherwise the viability of the new programmes is in
jeopardy. Bicycles for the CCAs; actions to stabilise
their pay and to reduce their need to travel forsupplies
and supervision in the rainy season; an exploration ol
ways to share the health work between CCAs, and for
community members to contribute to the CCAs
farms; and the selection of at least some non-migrant
members on the health committees arc some
possibilities.
need for family planning to enable women to achieve a
longer birth interval and a smaller family size, and to
avoid pregnancy during periods of economic stress.
As far as possible MCH services should be carried out
in the community, and young or elderly childminders
should be encouraged to attend.
References
Women might consider setting up daycare centres in
the rainy season.
The health service should respond to an expressed
ILO, 1984, Technological Change. Basic Needs and the
Condition of Rural Women, Geneva, June
Tomilayo, AdekanyeO., 1985, ‘Innovation and rural women
in Nigeria: cassava processing and food production’ in
I. Ahmed (ed.). Technology and Rural Women. George
Allen and Unwin, London
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57
Access to Food, Dry Season Strategies and Household Size amongst the
Bambara of Central Mali
Camilla Toulmin
The Bambara village of Kala lies on the northern
frontier for regular crop production in Mali (see Map).
With a long term mean rainfall of 600 mm per year,
this region forms part of the southern Sahelian zone.
Rainfall is concentrated in the three months from July
to September and intensive work in the fields must be
done during this short period to ensure a harvest.
Rainfall is highly variable in its distribution within the
year, between neighbouring villages in a given year
and from one year to the next. Expected rainfall levels
have been falling over the last 20 years; levels ranged
from 350-450 mm per year over the period 1980-83
before falling to the exceptionally low total of 250 mm
in the drought year of 1984.
Farmers have adapted to this risky environment in
several ways. Two millet varieties of different cycle
length are grown and it is rare for both varieties to fail
in the same year. Oxen phoughteams have been widely
adopted as they enable farmers to cultivate a very large
area of land per worker. Surplus grain is stored in
granaries or invested in livestock — cattle, sheep.
goats, horses and donkeys — which can then be sold in
years of food shortage. Within Bambara society, there
are also a variety of mechanisms through which grain
is redistributed (described in greater detail below,
which help individual households suffering crop
failure.
The lower rainfall levels of recent years have brought a
shift in resources towards an increase in area under
short cycle millet, as this has a greater chance of
reaching maturity during the short growing season.
However, this variety of millet only performs well on
manured soils. Farmers have therefore needed to gain
access to more dung in order to increase the area they
cultivate with this crop. Much of this dung comes from
relationships of exchange established during the dry
season between farmers and livestock-owners, the
latter gaining access to water for their slock from the
farmer's well in return for stabling their herds on the
farmer’s field each night. Wells have become crucially
important assets to farmers if they are to produce a
IDS Bulletin. 1986. vol 17 no 3. Institute of Development Studies. Sussex
58
regular grain surplus. Diagram 1 shows the growth in
private wells dug in the village, from which it can be
seen that by 1981 there was a total of 29 private wells.
The dry season of 1983 witnessed a further 16 wells
dug. However, these wells are far from evenly
distributed between the 29 households in Kala. The
largest domestic groups not only were the first to get a
well dug but they have also dug second and third wells,
thereby gaining access to large quantities of dung for
their fields. This strong correlation between household
size and levels of asset-ownership is discussed further
below.
While the climate imposes a heavy risk on producers,
due to rainfall variability, there are also other large
risks to which people are subject and against which
they attempt to protect themselves. This second class
of risk is largely demographic in nature and consists of
high levels of mortality, paticularly among children,
varying levels of fertility and the vulnerability of all
producers to sickness and disability. Many Bambara
live in large, complex domestic groups containing men
who share a common ancestor, often as many as five
or six generations in the past, living with their
mothers, sisters, wives and daughters. Men continue
living and working together over several generations
before the household divides, giving these large groups
a solidity and permanence which transcends the
importance of any particular individual.
The Large Bambara Household
Table 1 presents data on the distribution of
households by size in Kala, from which it may be seen
that 85 per cent of the population live in complex
households, the mean size of which exceeds 24 people.
These are very much larger groups than are found in
other West African village studies and this paper will
outline both the advantages which these large groups
reap and the internal structure of such groups which
allows them to minimise conflicts of interest between
their members. Large households face certain
advantages in crop and livestock production which
include:
Map
South and Central Mali
Diagram I
1960
61
62
63
64
65
66
67
Well-Digging by Households in Kala, 1960-83
68
69
70
71
72
73
74
75
76
77
78
79
80
81
82
78
79
80
81
82
83
wwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwww
Number of Wells Dug by Households per Year
s
1960
61
62
63
64
65
66
67
Cumulative Total of Private Wells Dug
60
68
69
70
71
72
73
74
75
76
77
83
Table I
Mean Household Size by Type, Kala 1981
No. of
hhs.
% of lota!
hhs.
Mean size
of hh.
% of total
population
Complex Households*
19
66%
23.8
(12.9)
85.6%
Simple Households**
10
34%
7.6
(3.8)
14.4%
Village Total
29
100%
18.2
(13.2)
100.0%
Note: * Complex households arc those containing more than one married man.
•* Simple households contain cither a single married man or unmarried men with a widowed mother.
Figures in brackets denote the standard deviation.
Table 2
Distribution of Wells, Workoxen and Breeding Cattle Holdings: Kala 1981
0
1- 4
5- 8
9- 12
13- 16
0
2° 1* (2.6)
4° 5* (4.9)
1 - 10
Breeding Callie Holdings
11-20
1° 5* 1** (5.1)
2* (10.7)
21 - 40
1*1** (7.9)
1* (11.6)
>40
1** (14.9)
1* 1»* (16.1)
I* 1** (16.9)
Note: Figures in the matrix refer to the number of households. °. *, ** refer to those households with no well, one well or two wells.
Figures in brackets are the mean number of household workers for that clement in the matrix.
HOLDINGS OF WORK
OXEN
(a) the diversification of income sources, thereby
reducing risk to overall income. In the rainy
season, women from larger households have time
to plant a small plot of grain which provides a
supplement to household grain supplies. In the past
few years, several households have also detached
one member to engage full-time in petty trade
during the farming season, a period when village
traders have a near monopoly on the supply of
goods in the village. Out of the six permanent
trading businesses, five are in the largest and richest
households for whom it represents an additional
source of income and avenue for wealth
accumulation. In the dry season, labour is spread
amongst a number of activities, some of which are
essential to maintaining the household’s farm and
livestock production while; others represent an
opportunity for the household and individual to
supplement income from other sources. Women in
households where they are not the sole woman in
charge of the cooking can share the housework,
leaving time free to devote to money-spinning
occupations. Migration by several young men to
town is easier for the larger households, since a few
of their peers can remain behind in the village to
water cattle and prepare for the next farming
61
M aggie M u rra y /F o rm a t
season, (b) economies of scale which operate in the
process of generating a surplus for investment in
productive assets. It is easier for larger households
to finance investment in large indivisible assets.
such as an oxen ploughteam, as they have at their
disposal an absolutely larger volume of resources.
Similarly, larger households have found it easier to
invest in digging a well because they can mobilise
their own labour force to get the well dug rather
than having to hire a well-digger.
Constructing a safe-water well Dogan Region. Mail.
West Africa.
Large households are also better able to protect their
members from demographic risk; they are less
vulnerable to the illness or death of one of their
members and they are likely to exhibit less variation in
dependency rates than a nuclear household. They can
also safeguard the investment made in acquiring a
woman as wife through the practice of the levirate, an
institution whereby a woman is inherited by the
younger brother of her dead husband. In a small
household, there is less likely to be an inheritor present
and the woman will pass out the household’s control
when she remarries.
The result of these advantages faced by larger
households is that they can build up a larger
agricultural surplus to be invested in assets such as
62
wells, oxen ploughteams and a breeding cattle herd.
Table 2 shows the distribution of the three main assets
between households in Kala from which it may be seen
that there is a strong positive correlation between
ownership of the different assets. Household size
increases regularly as one moves from the top left to
bottom right-hand corner of the table. Small
households are those most likely to be with neither a
well, work oxen nor a cattle holding, whereas the
largest holdings of these assets are associated with the
largest domestic groups. In addition, larger house
holds tend to be absolutely better-off, as may be seen
from Table 3. in which cattle holding per household
member is shown. This greater level of livestock
wealth per person for the larger households gives them
greater ability to finance tax and bridewealth
payments and to purchase grain in years of poor
harvest.
The advantages of large household size have been
described above. The disadvantages likely to arise
from the organisation and management of such a large
group (such as labour-incentive problems and
disputes over the allocation of labour time and other
resources) are minimised by specifying clearly the
rights and obligations of the individual to the joint
estate. Typically these consist of each household
member being required to work on the household’s
fields from the first sowing of grain in June or July
until the harvest is finally stored in January. In
addition to work in the field, women have domestic
duties to fulfill and men must water livestock.
Workers are allowed to retire from household
production and to devote themselves to their own
interests by their late forties or early fifties, women
tending to retire earlier than men, the exact moment
depending on the household’s access to labour with
which to replace them. In return for their labour,
household members normally receive food, have their
taxes paid and in the case of men, they can expect the
household to finance much of their marriage expenses.
Household Organisation by Season
Bambara household production is markedly different
in the two seasons of the year. The intensive farming
season, during which household members work and
eat together, is followed by less cohesive patterns of
production and consumption once the harvest is
stored and the dry season arrives. The Bambara
language makes a clear distinction between the two
patterns of organisation, the joint production for the
household estate being termed ‘foroba’ while the
individual pursuit and enjoyment of wealth is termed
‘suroforo’. ‘Foroba’ means literally ‘big field’ and
refers to the large field cultivated by the household as a
whole. ‘Suroforo’ means ‘night field’ and describes the
small plots farmed by individuals at twilight once
Table 3
Distribution of Cattle Holdings by Household, Kala 1981
Herd Size
No. of
HHs
Mean Herd
Size
Mean HH
Size*
Cattle/
HH member*
>40
21 -40
11-20
1 - 10
0
Village mean
5
4
1
16
3
29
78.4
31.3
20.0
4.1
0.0
20.8
31.1
22.0
11.5
9.7
4.0
14.6
2.52
1.57
1.74
0.42
0.00
0.94
Note: ♦Household size is calculated here using adult equivalents, in which those over 15 are taklen as I 0 and those under 15 as 0.5.
Table 4
Characteristics of Food Deficit and Surplus Households,
Kala 1980 and 1981
No. of HHs
Mean HH Size
Mean No. of
Wells/HH
Mean No. of
Cattle/HH
Mean Yield of
Millei/HH
Worker**
Deficit
households*
Surplus
Households*
15
12.7
14
23.4
0.6
1.3
5.1
37.6
1169
1733
Note: *Dcficit households were those that ran out of millet
before the harvest in both 1980 and 1981. *♦ Worker refers to
an index aggregating those of different age and sex by a
system of weights.
work on the household Held is finished for the day.
The ‘forobal’ harvest is housed in a single large
granary managed by the household head and from
which grain is taken for household meals, tax
payments and certain other joint expenses. Small
‘suroforo’ granaries are found by each married
woman’s hut and the grain from these provides her
with the means to cook the occasional special meal for
her husband and children and the income for
necessities and treats, such as clothing, soap, sugar
and sweets.
Despite its roots in the distinction between the two
kinds of field, the ‘foroba'/’suroforo’ dichotomy
applies in many other areas of Bambara life, such as
livestock holdings, some of which are owned by the
household whereas others are the property of a smaller
group or of an individual. The basis for the division of
activities, income and wealth between these two forms
of ownership rests on household members having
certain labour obligations to the joint household
estate, after which they are free to pursue their own
interests. In the dry season, once the millet is safely
stored, there are few demands made upon the
individual’s time. Household duties are limited to
watering the herd early in the morning and clearing
new land, both tasks performed by young men, while
women continue with their daily domestic tasks of
fetching water, cooking food, caring for children and
washing clothes. Once these tasks are accomplished,
men and women can work on their own account. Men
pursue a variety of activities which include fortune
tellers, going on migration to town, weaving cotton
cloth, hunting and making ropes. Women’s sources of
income consist of plaiting other women’s hair,
spinning cotton, dyeing cloth, collecting bush fruit
and preparing snacks for sale. Both men and women
also often have a petty trading business during the dry
season.
Eating Patterns by Season
In the rainy season, food is prepared and consumed by
the joint work-group, it being carried out to the field in
mid-morning. The household does its best to ensure
that people are properly fed during this time of intense
physical exertion, as the future year’s supply of grain
will largely depend on the speed and care with which
sowing, weeding and harvesting work is carried out. A
hurried, often cold, breakfast allows the men and girls
to leave the village soon after dawn to start work in the
field. Women stay behind to prepare the midday and
afternoon meals, before setting out around 10 a.m.
with their bowls of thick millet porridge, ‘to’, its
consistency being thought to provide the strength
63
needed by those who spend the day weeding. In mid
afternoon, the workforce sits down to a calabash of
‘degc'. a thin fermented gruel, lightly spiced and mixed
with a little soured milk if available. Most households
prepare a hot dish of’moni' porridge in the evening, a
light meal with which to send the household to sleep. A
few households however would have a second dish of
‘to’ prepared for the evening to satisfy their members
appetite and keep up their enthusiasm.
Once the peak weeding season is over, the pace of
activity slows. With the millet harvest safely stored in
January, many people disperse to visit relatives
elsewhere or go to towns to earn cash. Many
households continue to provide meals each day but a
thin millet gruel is substituted for the thick ‘to’
porridge at midday. Women take grain from their own
stores to prepare an alternative dish for their own
nuclear group, so that they can eat something more
tasty than this thin, watery dish. Those households
where grain is in very short supply aim to conserve
their stocks during the dry season by a variety of
means. People leave to work and stay in neighbouring
settlements, thereby reducing the burden of feeding
them on the household granary. Such households also
shift onto women the task of finding enough food for
immediate kin. In such cases, women’s granaries
change from being an alternative source of food to
providing the basic food ration for those remaining in
the dry season.
Food Deficit Households
Table 4 compares the characteristics of grain surplus
and deficit households in the village of Kala. Deficit
households are those which ran out of grain before the
next harvest in both 1980 and 1981. From this table, it
may be seen that 15 out of the 29 households in the
village suffered a food deficit in both years.
Many of these deficit households are of small size and
own few productive assets. They have lower than
average labour productivity because they have less
access to dung and to ploughteam services, both of
which are essential to ensure the regular production of
a millet surplus. Often with not enough grain to eat,
these households have been less able to invest in
productive assets, such as wells, nor do they own cattle
other than work oxen, which would be available for
sale in years of food shortage. Certain of the
households which ran out of grain early also had a
very unfavourable ratio of consumers to workers, so
that despite average yields per worker, the harvest was
not large enough for the household’s food needs. In
one extreme case, the household had run out of food in
May, before the end of the dry season. Part of this
deficit was attributable to the household's general
poverty — no well, ploughteam cattle or other
64
livestock owned. However, the severity of the food
shortage was due in large part to a major share of the
previous harvest having been sold to finance the
digging of a well using hired labour. The household
opted for a period of grave food shortage in order to
build up future productive capital in the form of a well
which, it was hoped, would provide dung for the fields
and raise yields of the short cycle millet. This
household’s food needs were met during the
forthcoming rainy season by a variety of strategies
which included sending the son to work for another
household in exchange for grain, collection of bush
fruit and begging of grain and bran from this and
neighbouring villages.
Access to Food
The household's food needs arc met from various
sources, few farmers have stored grain from harvests
in prior years from which grain was taken for
household meals. Women’s granaries provided a
major addition to food stocks in many of the smaller,
poorer households. The stocks held by elderly women
are especially important in this respect as these
women, being free from work in the household field,
can cultivate a substantial field of their own. Apart
from the harvest of private fields, women also acquire
grain from harvesting and winnowing fees and from
gifts received from relatives at harvest-time. It is
common for men and women, but particularly the
latter, to travel to neighbouringsettlements at harvest
time. They help carry out the harvest and they winnow
the grain, receiving in exchange a calabash of millet.
Women’s granaries can contain a considerable
quantity of grain; while a busy young wife may have
only 100-200 kg of millet, older, retired women often
have more than 1.000 kg at their disposal.
Food supplies are supplemented for some by sending
one of their family to work for another during the
rainy season, the wages for this labour being paid in
the form of several measures of grain.
Cash may also be used to buy grain, as when migrants’
earnings are used to purchase sacks of millet or when
assets have been sold. During several weeks of the dry
season food may also be procured by collecting
various bush fruit, such as bere (Boscia senegalensis)
and baobab. Official systems of redistribution exist in
the more Islamicised villages of the region, one tenth
of the harvest being set aside as ‘jaka’. or tithe, to be
given to other members of the community. In Kala, a
similar proportion of the harvest is redistributed,
though in a less formal manner. Women in Kala
appropriate large quantities of grain at winnowing
time, both for themselves and for payment of
winnowing fees to those women helping them. Direct
gifts between households are rare, a few cases occuring
at major festivals when a particularly devout man
made gifts of 30-40 kg to poorer neighbours. Lewis
(1979) also notes the low incidence of such direct gifts
in his study of a strongly traditional Bambara village
to the south of Segou. He attributes the absence of
such flows to the importance attached by villagers to
egalitarian ideals and the consequent desire to avoid
relations of dependence between poorer and richer
households. If grain is channelled through women,
help is given to poorer members of the community but
at lower cost to men's pride.
The poorer households in Kala gained a significant
proportion of their food needs from sources other
than the previous harvest. However, while non-harvest
sources play an important part, these households are
often less able to exploit them fully. For example,
many of these grain deficit households contain a single
woman of working age who has little time to cultivate
a field of her own. Women in the five smallest
households were the only ones in Kala not to have a
private field of their own. With their small workforce,
the household can less readily send out of its members
to work elsewhere during the farming season, in order
to earn millet, without seriously affecting its own
ability to farm. In the dry season, the daily demand for
labour to water plough oxen limits how much time can
be spent on migration and thus the amount of cash
available from this source with which to purchase
food. Larger households are better placed to tap the
range of incomes available, as there is a sufficient
workforce forsome to remain in the village to perform
essential dry season tasks while others can go off
looking for work. The few assets owned by food deficit
households also limit the cash which can be raised
from their sale. Owning no cattle other than work
oxen, these animals cannot be sold to buy food
without diminishing the household's ability to farm.
In addition, sheep and goats, largely owned by
women, are usually few in numbers in these small
grain deficit households, as few women can build up
enough of a surplus to invest in these stock.
Dry Season as Adjustment Period
The dry season presents different opportunities to
different households. Those which have had a poor
harvest must both enable their members to survive
during these months and generate sufficient income to
purchase the food needed to farm the following
season. Hence the common strategy of those in
greatest distress is one whereby the compound empties
once the meagre harvest is assessed and people scatter
to pursue their luck elsewhere. By contrast, those in
grain surplus households can use this period of relative
freedom from household labour obligations to
generate private income and accumulate their own
sources of wealth.
In years of poor harvest, the strategy followed by a
household depends on a number of factors, such as the
extent to which other producers have been similarly
touched, the ownership of livestock and the
consequent demands on dry season labour, and the
depth of links with other producers in this and
neighbouring villages through which help may be
sought.
The measures taken during the dry season will
intensify the more widespread and sizeable the harvest
failure. If only a few households have had a poor
harvest, they can obtain a significant supplement to
their stocks from grain distributed at harvest-time and
from gifts made to women. In 1980 and 1981, the
millet harvest in Kala was better than that in many
other villages and, consequently, households in Kala
received a stream of visitors at harvest-time and in the
dry season that followed. In all, more than 80 men and
women came to pass several weeks in Kala during the
dry season of 1981. Most of these visitors were from
settlements no more than 50 km away and they stayed
with a household with whom they were able to
establish some sort of kin link. Such links were often
fairly distant; one man remarked that in years when
his harvest had been a success, he got to know this
more distantly related kin very much better.
In ayearsuch as 1984. when drought burned the millet
crop of most villages in the region, by early September
almost all young men had left to go to the cities as soon
as it was clear that the harvest had failed. The start of
the harvest in mid-October witnessed the movement
by many women to the few villages whose crops had
performed relatively well. These women planned to
spend tw'o or three months harvesting and winnowing
grain and earning millet in return.
Thus, the highly localised distribution of rainfall in
this region coupled with differences in soils and access
to dung mean that harvests vary considerably from
village to village in a single year. Shifts in population
from grain deficit to surplus areas provide some access
to food for those in need, while enabling those with
large harvests to get the grain winnowed and stored
with greater speed.
Changing Strategies for Deficit Households
Methods of coping with food shortage in this region
have adapted to changing circumstances over the past
couple of centuries. When Mungo Park travelled
through the region in the 1790s, he noted the
destitution of many families and the common practice
of pawning a child to a richer neighbour in exchange
for grain. The child eats with and works for his newfamily but will return home when his parents are able
to redeem him by repaying the original sum. This
65
system was quite widely practised even until fairly
recently, a woman from one household in Kala having
been pawned as a child during the difficult vears of the
1930s.
The institution of domestic slavery povided cheap
labour both to till fields and to carry out domestic
tasks until its formal abolition in 1905. As the master
was responsible for only some of the slave's food
needs, owning slaves afforded some measure of
protection from food shortages. A further means by
which communities coped with harvest failure in the
pre-colonial period was by raiding other villages.
Huddled within an encircling mud wall, these villages
tried to protect themselves from the threat of raids
from stronger neighbours. However, the use of sieges
and other tactics allowed local warlords to capture
and plunder other settlements in a manner similar to
the larger-scale military manoeuvres of the I Sth and
19th century kings of Scgou. One old man in Kala.
interviewed by a colonial officer in the 1920s,
described the difficulty they now faced, following the
French conquest and pacification, as villages in need
could no longer raise a force to supplement their
reserves by seizing others' gram.
In the 1930s, a series of poor harvests coincided with
annual invasions by locusts throughout this region.
The collapse of world market prices for many
traditional commodities, such as shea-nut butter and
kapok fibre, badly hit villages in the Scgou region who
relied on the sale of these products for money with
w’hich to pay taxes. Harvest failure, tax demands and
the requisitioning of grain forced people throughout
the zone to sell assets and to earn money on migration.
Refusal to pay taxes was sternly dealt with: on one
occasion the administration rounded up and carried
away all Kala’s womenfolk, who were only released
once the missing sum had been found. Both livestock
and gold were sold during the 1930s to find the money
for taxes. One Commandant of Segou noted a flood of
gold had been traded in 1933-34 and he attributed this
to the heavy pressure on villagers to meet tax
payments in these years of penury. Several villagers
from Kala told of the liquidation of their entire cattle
holdings during this period in an attempt to raise cash.
66
Migration by young men became an important means
to earn cash from the 1920s onwards. Initially they
travelled to the groundnut growing areas of western
Mali and eastern Senegal and to the gold mining
regions on the border between Mali and Guinea. Old
men from Kala and neighbouring settlements can still
intone the names of those villages through which they
passed on the north-long trek to Senegal. The rising
economic prosperity of Ivory Coast now attracts most
of the young men from this region who plan to go on
long distance migration.
Conclusions
Households in this region of marginal and high risk
farming have long needed strategies for dealing with
food shortage. Certain activities such as raiding can no
longer be practised. Others such as migration have
grown in importance. Households differ considerably
in their ability to feed their members, the larger
domestic groups being less vulnerable to chronic food
shortages. These differences arise not only out of
variation in the ownership of productive assets used in
farming but also from differences in the household’s
ability to diversify its income-earning activities. The
dry season is the main time available for such
diversification. Grain deficit households must spend
this season finding food for the farming season to
come, whereas those in the larger grain surplus
households can use the dry season to accummulatc
private sources of wealth. Redistribution of grain
within the community remains of great importance to
those who have suffered a poor harvest. People may
try to limit the demands made upon them by
importunate relatives, by converting surplus grain
into livestock holdings, but the basic duty to provide
hospitality and help to those in need continues to be a
strong element within Bambara society.
References
Lewis. John van dusen, 1979. 'Descendants and Crops: Two
Poles of Production in a Malian Peasant Village’. PhD
thesis. Department of Anthropology, Yale
Seasonality and Poverty: Implications for Policy and Research
Richard Longhurst. Robert Chambers and Jeremy Swift
Approaches to Seasonality
The papers in this Bulletin illustrate how acute the
seasonal stresses placed on poor rural people can be,
and how much they differ between groups and
environments. Diverse groups such as pastoralists,
culivators, the landless and women have different
repertoires of response to cope with regular seasonal
stresses, and use them with varying degrees of success.
They find it harder to deal with unexpected fluctuations
in food supply or incomes, or sudden losses of
livelihood or family member, as can occur through
unanticipated domestic or economic events. For
regular seasonal stresses, coping mechanisms arc
many and include depleting food stocks, eating less,
changing the composition of the diet, migration,
exploiting common property resources, switching
occupations, selling assets such as livestock, and
changing cropping patterns and farm operation.
These strategics arc often versatile and complex and
little understood by outsiders. The most striking
aspect of how people cope with seasonality is its
diversity. There arc agronomic, nutritional, economic,
demographic and social mechanisms which arc called
into play, and the human body itself also has a range of
biological adaptations in the face of stress.
These articles and other research in the past few years
qualify and refine the original wet-dry seasonal
scenario [see Chambers, Longhurst and Pacey, 19811Four aspects stand. The first is the significance of quite
short recurrent periods during the year, often a matter
of a few weeks and sometimes just a few days.
Examples arc transplanting rice among Lambardi and
Koya tribals in India, when women are overworked,
children neglected and births peak; planting, weeding
and harvesting peaks with some crops especially in
unimodal short rainy season agriculture; and the
transitional period from dry seasons to rains when
pastoralists' workloads are intense, cereal prices high
and herds vulnerable.
Second, the inter-seasonal effects of a succession of
bad years can swamp the 'normal' seasonal pattern.
The build-up to the 1984/85 famine in Eastern Africa
and the Sahel was preceded by several years of poor
rainfall during which rural people's sequence of
coping mechanisms described in several articles in this
Bulletin were brought into play and progressively
weakened. Selling assets became less effective as
prices, for instance for livestock, fell dramatically. In
Ethiopia, cereal prices continued to rise after harvest
when the normal seasonal effect would have been for
them to fall [Cutler 1985], Similarly, after a succession
of bad years migration will not follow normal seasonal
patterns.
For some, contingencies may overlap with the
combination of seasonal and household life cycle
stress. People in the households are especially
vulnerable. These households include those with
several small children, or composed of old people, or
having to cope with a major life cycle event such as
overcoming death of a productive member or meeting
the expenses of a marriage.
Third, different groups, especially children, women
and men experience and perceive the seasons
differently. Stress is ‘handed on’ from men to women
and children, as vividly illustrated in the paper by
Jiggins. For the Indian tribals studied by Gillespie
(1986). July transplanting was perceived as bad by
women, and winter guarding of crops as bad by men.
There arc similar differences between large farmers.
subsistence farmers, and the landless. Grain deficit
households search for food while surplus households
accumulate wealth. In Mali, as elsewhere, differences
in asset ownership enabling some Bambara, at the
expense of others, to diversify income earning
activities.
Fourth, seasonality can be a major dimension of
adverse economic change. Insub-Africa, in particular,
it is part of the process of impoverishment which is
making people more vulnerable. Increasing popu
lation, scarcer land, changes in resource ownership
and access and declining land quality together amplify
IDS Rullelin. 19X6. vol 17 no 3. Institute of Development Studies. Sussex
67
seasonal fluctuations and shortages of both food
supply and agricultural incomes. The pastoralists of
Central Niger are probably typical of many others in
losing land to agriculturalists, being increasingly
forced to sell off their young cattle and herd cattle
owned by non-pastoralists for low wages, and holding
herds whose numbers and composition are no longer
viable. As they and others lose assets and become
poorer, they become less and less able to cope with bad
years and also more vulnerable to regular seasonal
stress.
widely are unlikely to be very effective. Third, it is
crucially important that awareness is increased: that
urban-based, season-proofed professionals become
more aware of what rural people know only too well
about how adverse seasonality affects them and how
they try to handle it. Far greater knowledge and
appreciation is required of the pattern of income
earning and food acquiring activities of vulnerable
people, especially when urban-based professionals are
least likely to travel at the times of year when things
are worst for rural people.
For these four reasons, seasonal analyses and counterseasonal measures have to be more sensitive and more
differentiated — in timing, within seasons, in response
to previous bad years, in helping vulnerable groups.
and in slowing and counteracting impoverishment.
With deepening poverty, seasonality also becomes
even more significant as an adverse factor, and as a
point of entry for analysis and action. It is of especial
relevance to sub-Saharan Africa with its long-term
decline in per capita agricultural production, directly
and distressingly linked to poverty and development.
It is important not just to enable people to struggle out
of poverty, but through various measures to
strengthen and add to their coping mechanisms so that
their vulnerability does not increase. Seasonality, even
more than before, is a critical dimension in rural
programmes. Counter-seasonal interventions can
moderate adverse seasonal effects, but the best season
proofing is not to be poor, and the best counterseasonal policy is one which successfully targets
resources to enable those who are vulnerable to
become less poor.
In the area of agricultural research and technology
development, it is basic to recognise the complex
measures adopted by farmers to exploit the seasons
while moderating risk. Crop diversification, mixed
cropping and serial cropping are all means whereby
farmers cope with uncertain rainfall. Different
varieties within a crop allow staggered dates of
harvesting to provide a flow of harvested material and
income over an extended period and spread risks and
smooth labour peaks. Agricultural technologies that
allow people greater choice of activity and timing
should be considered. In the context of seasonality in
sub-Saharan Africa this requires giving more support
to crops which can be harvested flexibly, such as root
crops and some gathered foods, and to those varieties
of cereals and legumes that are counter-seasonal in
impact. For example, development of quick-maturing
millets would reduce risks in drought-prone areas and
shorten the hungry season. The seasonal perspective in
agricultural research adds support to two criteria in
agricultural research: yield per unit time in addition to
per unit area; and the timing of activities and
especially harvest in relation to household resources
and needs. Emphasis on livestock such as cattle and
sheep, which in the Sahel provide milk in the rainy
season when farmers’ food stocks are low, can be
important for the same reason, while camels and goats
may play a similar role for herders in their hungry dry
season.
Implications for Policy
Seasonality needs to be keyed into existing policy,
technology development, and support for vulnerable
groups. It needs to be repeated that poverty and
seasonality are interlinked and that without poverty
there would be fewer, or no, adverse seasonal effects.
Regarding general policy, three points can be made.
First, seasonality-related policies should seek to
strengthen and add to — not weaken — the many ways
in which people cope with seasonal stress and reover
from it.
Second, analysis and action have to be decentralised
and differentiated, in timing and targetting:
seasonalities vary, and include short crucial periods.
local environmental diversity, especially in hinterlands
away from more uniform and developed agricultural
areas of deltasand plains, and differential vulnerability
and impacts for children, women and men. These all
require a versatile repertoire of possible counterseasonal interventions; blanket measures applied
68
Seasonal stress is often most critical for groups who
are vulnerable anyway. These arc the poor and those
at vulnerable stages in the household life cycle, and
within the poor, women and children. For the poor,
this indicates allocation of agricultural research
resources for the crops they grow. For women and
children, linkages can be made between the allocation
of a woman’s time, her welfare and that of her child.
Technology in the domestic domain (processing.
preservation and preparation) could well ease
seasonal work bottlenecks for women. Technology in
agriculture can have an important impact on
vulnerable group health by spreading work peaks or
increasing returns to women’s crops and livestock and
their income. In most countries there is a complex
sexual division of labour and appropriation of
product from farm work. Women do have activities,
the products of which both contribute to the
communal cooking pot and to their own incomes. The
latter in particular can have a significant impact on
child nutrition, especially seasonally when malnutrition
is worst. A direct seasonal intervention as discussed in
the Editorial, would be provision of child care
facilities even for a short period, when women are
working in the fields in the rainy season. This should
improve both child health and agricultural pro
ductivity: a linkage which illustrates the value of a
seasonal mode of analysis.
The more strictly economic domain offers several
means of mitigating adverse seasonal effects. One is a
better integration of markets. In sub-Saharan Africa
where market integration is poor, this is especially
important. There is scope for improved roads and
other physical infrastructure, and better information
and communication for the more accurate prediction
of prices for foodgrains and livestock. Another
measure, of benefit to the landless and pastoralists, is
price stabilisation of foodgrains at reasonable low
levels during the dry season and early wet season. Yet
another is official intervention in the livestock market
when bad conditions threaten a slump, to maintain
livestock values and the livestock to grain exchange
ratio. Again, if other assets or products are sold, such
as firewood or charcoal, these can be bought and
stockpiled, with the advantage that they may store
better than livestock, and do not deplete herds. (Credit
schemes need reassessment together with extension, to
make marketing chains less risky, especially for
livestock). Recovery from a bad season also deserves
imaginative support, and loans for the replacement of
major capital assets such as cattle would enable
pastoralists to recover more quickly. There is
probably a major role for financial intermediation
through more flexible and widespread credit schemes
and possibly banking, especially for those pastoralists
whose economy is more market integrated. Grain
stores and cereal banks, facilitated by targetted credit,
could also be important for both farmersand herders.
Seasonal fluctuations in food availability are often
seen to be most marked in drought prone or semi-arid
areas. In periods of acute famine, families turn to the
bush for foods and livelihoods. A natural resources
policy to protect common property resources,
especially trees, is essential. Trees act as important
seasonal buffers, as shown in this Bulletin, providing
food, forage for livestock, firewood charcoal,
medicines, and other products. All of these can be
converted into scarce seasonal income for those who
own or have access to the trees. Pilot and experimental
tree fodder projects by and with pastoralists (including
trials with tenure and insufruct arrangements) deserve
to be undertaken. Seasonal grazing and browse
reserves may also have a role to play as long as they ar
genuinely under the control of the local community.
The occurrence of acute seasonal food shortages
turning into a famine before effective relief measures
can be taken might be avoided by decentralised
diagnosis. This will require the identification of
appropriate indicators and the establishment of a
household or village level response mechanism. As
indicators, Campbell and Trechter (1982) have
suggested hunting and gathering of wild foods, and
migration, as being relatively easier to monitor with
eating behaviour of households less easy to judge.
Unexpected price rises and drying out of river beds
might be easy to monitor. Generally the head people in
a village are aware of local conditions even to the
extent of knowing what is going on in households.
This is particularly true of societies where avoidance
of outright indigence by sharing of resources is a
custom. At the local level such knowledge might be
used to provide advance warnings of the onset of
severe shortages if channelled into an appropriate
institutional framework.
Overall, to reduce seasonal and inter-year fluctuations
in food supply, production systems have to be less
risky, for both women and men. Many technical
interventions increase variability and risk, especially
when they depend on poorly functioning markets.
Reducing the risk of adverse seasonal effects requires
diversification, wider choice of crop, livestock and
income-earning activity, marketing infrastructure and
support, and for poor households multiple sources of
food and income.
Implications for Research
Within many of the policy options mentioned above
there is need for research to better define how poor
people’s production activities could be strengthened.
In other words, seasonal coping strategies require
more investigation: what are their limits (especially in
the face of population growth and on marginal land)?
How far are they reversible? And how might
development efforts strengthen them? In allocating
research resources it is now possible that less needs to
be spent on describing seasonal patterns. We should
use an analytical framework that builds and tests short
interdisciplinary hypotheses about causal chains
These would link among other factors, particular
seasonal events, random bad years and trends in the
political economy. Some of the best lessons might be
empirical, from implementingcounterseasonal policies
and seeing how seasonally vulnerable people are
affected and respond. Important lessons could be
learned from analysing the many famine early warning
systems now being set up in dry Africa.
69
Seasonal factors are not new to on-farm research and
farming systems research generally, but need to be
further integrated in them. Farmers have priorities for
different types of crops according to their vulnerability
to seasonality. They allocate their land, labour and
other inputs according to these priorities. This also has
implications for the sexual division of labour and
control of product in the household which in turn has
further seasonal implications.
Institutions also play a part in counter-seasonal
strategies. Basic research on financial institutions for
the management of inter-seasonal and inter-annual
risk, i.e.. insurance, banking, credit and redistributive
taxation, might bring benefits. In particular, rotating
credit associations are present in most rural
communities and are a local means of saving and
meeting cash needs. The effective introduction of
more extensive financial networks would require an
examination of the working of these local institutions.
Local organisations can also be used to build
institutions for management of common property
resources of seasonal importance: trees, rangeland,
water, fish and wildlife. Our information on such
institutions is poor.
Finally, more should be known about how seasonal
deprivation influences people in their attitudes to
innovation, risk-taking, and planning ahead. These
might be described as psycho-physiological factors.
For example, is expected seasonal deprivation a factor
inducing people to the strategy of having many
children? Might a lower birth rate be expected where
70
fluctuations in food supply, even for poor people, are
not severe?
This selective agenda of policy and research needs
show that seasonality matters especially for the poor
and vulnerable, and that policies and projects can have
components which reduce seasonal adversity. It is
especially — though not only — in those parts of the
world which are remote, semi-arid, or arid and with
uncertain rainfall that seasonality has become and
must remain a prominent dimension of policy and
research.
References
Campbell, D. J., and D. D. Trechtcr, 1982, 'Strategies for
coping with food consumption shortage in the Mandera
Mountain Region of North Cameroon*. Social Science &
Medicine 16, pp2117-27
Chambers. R.. R. Longhurst and A. Pacey (eds.). 1981,
Seasonal Dimensions to Rural Poverty. Frances Pinter.
London
Cutler. P.. 1985. The Use of Economic and Social Information
in Famine Prediction and Response. Report to the Overseas
Development Administration, London
Gillespie. S.. 1980. "Perceptions of health and seasonably in
two South Indian tribal groups’, London School of Hygiene
and Tropical Medicine (mimeo)
Books Received
Douglas E. Horton, Social Scientists in Agricultural Research:
Lessons from the Mantaro Valley Project. Peru, IDRC.
Ottawa, 1984
El Haj Bilal Omer, The Danagla Traders of Northern Sudan,
Ithaca Press, London, 1986
Robert E. Rhoades, Breaking New Ground: Agricultural
Anthropology, International Potato Center, Lima. 1984
Zulkuf Aydin, Underdevelopment and Rural Structures in
Southeastern Turkey: the household economy in Gisgis and
Kalhana, Ithaca Press, London, 1986
Gregory J. Scott. Markets. Myths and Middlemen: a study of
potato marketing in Central Peru, International Potato
Center, Lima, 1985
R. S. Ganapathy et al (eds.), Public Policy and Policy Analysis
in India, Sage, New Delhi and London, 1985
Poverty and Hunger: Issues and Options for Food Security in
Developing Countries, The World Bank, Washington DC,
1986
Donald McGranahan, Eduardo Pizarro and Claude Richard.
Measurement and Analysis ofSocio-economic Development,
UNR1SD, Geneva, 1985
Steven E. Sanderson, The Transformation of Mexican Agri
culture, Princeton University Press, 1986
Edward Maltby, Waterlogged Wealth: why waste the worlds
wet places? Earthscan, London, 1986
Gunilla Andrae and Bjorn Beckman, The Wheat Trap, Zed,
London,1986
Ozay Mehmet, Development in Malaysia, Croom Helm,
London,1986
Robert Klitgaard, Data Analysis for Development, OUP,
Pakistan, 1985
Ian Smillie, No Condition Permanent:pump-printing Ghana's
industrial revolution. Intermediate Technology Publi
cations, London,1986
Arnold Pacey with Adrian Cullis, Rainwater Harvesting:
the collection of rainfall and run off in rural areas.
Intermediate Technology Publications, London, 1986
Review '85 Outlook '86, North-South Institute, Ottawa. 1986
Gregory J. Scott and M. Gary Costello (eds.). Contmercializacidn Interna de los Alimentos en America Latina: Probiemas. Productos y Politicos, IDRC, Ottawa. 1985
Rapid Population Change in China, 1952-1982, Report No. 27,
Committee on Population and Demography. National
Academy Press, Washington DC. 1984
Peter Bartclmus, Environment and Development, Allen &
Unwin, Boston (Mass.), 1986
People’s Participation in Development and the Management
of Natural Resources, Report on the Caribbean Regional
Workshop in Vieux Fort, St. Lucia, April 15-19. 1985,
CODEL. New York, 1986
A ‘Geneva Group’. How to Run a Small Development
Project, Intermediate Technology Publications, London.
1986
Vai Curtis, Women and the Transport of Water, Intermediate
Technology Publications, London, 1986
Hanne Christensen, Refugees and Pioneers: history andfield
study of a Burundian settlement in Tanzania, UNRISD.
Geneva, 1985
E. Philip English, The Great Escape? An examination of
North-South tourism. The North-South Institute, Ottawa,
1986
Linda Jacobs, Environmentally Sound Small-Scale Livestock
Projects: guidelines for planning, CODEL/HPI/VITA/
Winrock International, New York, 1986
Stefan Musto (cd.), Endogenous Development a Myth or a
Path? Problems of Economic Self-Reliance in the European
Periphery, Eadi-Book Scries 5, German Development
Institute, Berlin, 1985
Yearbook of Socio Economic Indicators of the QIC Member
Countries. 1985, Statistical Economic and Social Research
and Training Centre for Islamic Countries/Organisation
of the Islamic Conference. Ankara, 1986
University of Warwick Annual Report 1984/85
The Design and Manufacture of Animal-Drawn Carts, Inter
mediate Technology Publications for the International
Labour Office (ILO) and the United Nations Centre for
Human Settlements (Habitat), London, 1986
Ruby Sandhu and Joanne Sandler. The Tech andTools Book:
a guide to technologies women are using worldwide, IT
Publications. London, 1986
Barrie Evans. Understanding Natural Fibre Concrete its
application as a budding material, IT Publications. London.
1986
71
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72
patron de cultivos de los granjeros africanos En la medida en que la
presidn demografica se intonsifica en Africa, se requierc gasto fiscal
para apoyar al sector agricola y para reducir el impacto de la mala
estacion en los ultrapobres. De especial importancia son las
politicas para apoyar a los migrantes, para proveer credito rural y
para manejar los recursos comunitarios
Mujeres y estaclonalldad: enfrenlando la crisis y la calamldad
Janice Jiggins
Este articulo examina la contribucion de la produccion de las
mujeres. asi como su trabajo y servicios en la eslera domdstica, en el
manejo de las tensiones estacionales, las crisis y las calamidades.
Los subtitulos pertinentes son: cambio de tareas y responsabilidades
adscritas segun sexo. diversificacidn de las fuentes de ingresos del
hogar; cambio en la intensidad y combinacidn de ocupaciones
multiples; jardin del hogar y recursos comunitarios. procesamiento
de alimentos, preservacidn y preparacidn. orgamzacion social.
entrega de regalos Proporciona un analisis de la adversidad y
calamidad que destaca la recuperacion de la mterconexidn de los
hogares dependientes de jefes de hogar mujeres y plantea nuevas
preguntas relativas a la prelerencia por riesgos. la evaluacion de
probabilidades y la valoracion del tiempo de trabajo de la mujer
Escasez de alimentos y estaclonalldad en las comunidades
WoDaaBe de Niger
Cynthia White
La informacion sobre los pastores nomades de Niger central,
demuestra claramente que la estacionalidad. a traves de una
coincidencia de factores tensionales en las estaciones seca y
transicional, refuerza la pobreza de este grupo. Aunque la dureza de
la estacion seca es Importante. solo constituye un sintoma de
factores politicos y econdmicos mis cruciales que afectan la
economia de WoDaaBe
Eslrateglas de alimentaclon hogarena para responder a la
estaclonalldad y el hambre
Richard Longhurst
Las familias rurales tienen una serie de estrategtas para enfrentar las
fluctuaciones estacionales e interestacionales de la disponibilidad
de alimentos. Para los hogarescon tierra, la mas importanteconsiste
en la eleccidn de patrones de cultivos para dispersar los riesgos e
incluye cultivos mixtos y produccion de cultivos secondaries,
especialmenteraices Otromecanismoestacionalresideenlaventa
de pequenos bienes y animales. el uso de productos almacenados y
el desarrollo de relaciones sociales de apoyo El trabajo remunerado
fuera de la granja constituye uno de los mejores amortiguadores en
contra de la tension estacional. Si una mala estacion se prolongs en
una sequia o si subitamente cae el poder de compra, las actividades
mencionadas se intensifican aim m^s. pero las familias son forzadas
a desinvertir recursos. debiendo vender bienes productivos. ademas
de constrehir el consumo de alimentos y emigrar Si la inversion en
areas rurales y en la produccion de alimentos reconociese estas
estrategias, el severo impacto del hambre podria evitarse.
Blomasa, ser humano y estacionalidad en el trdpico
Colin Leakey
La investigacidn agricola vinculada a politicas gubernamentales
tendientes a incrementar la disponibilidad de biomasa para proveer
alimentos. forraje y medicinas requiere una revision. Al ignorar los
arboles y alimentos asociados, las politicas no han satisfecho las
demandas de alimentos en las zonas aridas y el dnfasis puesto en el
increment© del producto por unidad de area, ha acentuado la
estacionalidad de la produccidn al favorecer la seleccion de
especies de cultivos que requieren largos penodos de disponibiidad
de humedad El uso de plantas para medicamentos. estimulantes y
control de fertilidad. tambien tiene importantes efectos estacionales.
no obstante, la atencion que ha recibido hasta la fecha es minima. La
clasificacion de Raunkiaer. basada en las formas de proteccion y el
tamano de los brotes de las plantas, permite un analisis de su real
uso de humedad y lemperatura. proveyendo un marco de trabajo
para vincular la produccidn estacional de biomasa con las
necesidades humanas
Arboles, estacionalidad y pobres
Robert Chambers y Ricnard Longhurst
Los arboles desempenan un papel s<gnificativo en la ocupacion
estacional de las personas pobres tdpico que ha sido descuidado
debido a la falta de entendimiento de la forma en que los pobres
aseguran su ingreso y a la ignorancia de los multiples roles de los
arboles Estos juegan un importante papel estacional por sus
caracteristicas fisicas raices profundas con acceso a la humedad y
nutrientes durante todo el aho. produccion de frutas y semillas
distribuida en largos periodos. acumulacidn de existences en la
forma de madera y varios efectos ambientales beneficiosos. Los
arboles estabilizan. protegen y apoyan las ocupaciones de los
pobres rurales. pudiendo disenarse politicas que refuercen este
importante rol
Estacionalidad en un distrllo de la sabana de Gana. Percepciones de
las mujeres y de los trabajadores de la salud
Gill Gordon
Los hogares de un distrito costero de Gana. tratan de mantener una
disponibilidad de alimentos constante. trabajando en la agricuitura.
la pesca y el comercio. El comercio de alimentos procesados es
altamente competitive en la estacion lluviosa. Muchas familias
migran temporalmente cuando se producen condiciones adversas
en la agricuitura o el comercio. La tension estacional reduce la
habilidad de las mujeres para cuidar de los hijos y hacer uso de los
servicios de salud Los trabajadores de la salud de la villa.
consideran que su trabajo agricola es de mayor priondad que sus
tareas de salud. en el periodo de mayor demanda por sus servicios
Este articulo sugiere medidas para reducir el impacto de la tension
estacional sobre los hogares y los trabajadores de la salud.
Acceso a los alimentos, estrategias de la estacion seca y tamano de
los hogares entre los Bambara de Mali central
Camilla Toulmin
Este articulo describe la variacidn estacional en la produccion y
organizacion hogarena de un pueblo agricola Saheli Una vezque la
cosecha esta almacenada. las responsabilidades domesticas
disminuyen y el mdividuo puede optar entre una sene de actividades
remuneradas. Los hogares superavitarios de granos pueden usar
este periodo para construir sus fuentes privadas de riqueza. Los
hogares deficitarios de granos deben usar los ingresos de la
estacion seca para ayudarse hasta la prdxima estacion agrico.'a La
distinta capacidad para hacer uso de la estacion seca acentua las
diferencias en el tamano y riqueza del hogar
Estacionalidad y pobreza: Implicaciones para la politica y la
investigacidn
Richard Longhurst. Roberts Chambers y Jeremy Swift
Hay una gran diversidad en la forma en que diferentes grupos de
personas son afectadas y enfrentan la estacionalidad Se requiere
un mayor entendimiento de esta diversidad para que la intervencidn
de politicas y proyectos fortalezcan la posicidn de las personas
pobres del campo A veces. los periodos daiiinos pueden ser muy
cortos, menoscabando generalmente los esfuerzos de las familias
para acumular recursos y proteger su salud. En el subsahara
africano. la estacionalidad adquiere claramente una mayor
dimension en el cambio economic© adverse, la dechnacion en la
disponibiidad de alimentos y la creciente inestablidad en la oferta de
alimentos. Como resultado de ello, la estacionalidad se ha
constituido en un punto de entrada mas significative para el analisis
y la accidn Se requieren politicas que tengan a los grupos mas
vulnerables como objetivo. que refuercen los mecanismos para
enfrentar la estacionalidad y que reflejen un enfoque descentralizado
y diferenciado cronoldgicamente
NOTES ON CONTRIBUTORS
Richard Longhurst is an agricultural economist whose main interest
is in the linkages between agricultural production, food policy and
consumption and nutrition This has included research on food aid,
investment projects, seasonality and plant breeding He has carried
out field research in northern Nigeria and has been staff member of
FAO and the World Bank. He is a co-editor of Seasonal Dimensions
to Rural Poverty, and is currently a Visiting Fellow at IDS
Michael Lipton (Fellow of IDS. and Professor of Economics. Sussex
University) has worked mainly on agriculture and rural development
in South Asia and Eastern and Southern Africa He has also analysed
economic relations between India, the UK and the EEC. His
publications include Why Poor People Stay Poor Urban Bias and
World Development (1977) and four studies on characteristics of
poverty groups in respect of nutrition, demography, labour and land
(1983 and 1985).
Janice Jiggins is a freelance consultant in the management and
organisation of local level services for the rural poor, with a special
interest in agricultural research and extension and women in
development. She was the principal organiser of the 1982 Regional
Workshop on seasonal variations in the provisioning, nutrition and
health of rural families, held at AMREF. Nairobi, a member of the
1984-85 Consultative Group on International Agricultural Research
Impact Study of the work of the International Agricultural Research
Centres, and a speaker at the recent conference on Gender Issues in
Farming Systems Research at the University of Florida. Gainesville
Cynthia White is writing a PhD thesis for the Department of Social
Anthropology. University of Cambridge
Colin Leakey was involved in Government agricultural research in
Uganda before joining the staff of Makerere University where he was
Reader/Research Fellow in Crop Science. Since leaving Uganda in
1973 he has been m private practice both as a tropical agriculture
consultant and a plant breeder of leguminous crops in Europe. He is
a Visiting Professor attached to the Department of Pharmacy at the
University of Strathclyde
Robert Chambers is a Fellow of the IDS and has practical and
research experience in rural development He has worked in Kenya.
Botswana, Sri Lanka and India, and has been a consultant on rural
development in other countries of Africa and Asia. He is author of
Settlement Schemes in Tropical Africa (1969) and Managing Rural
Development (1974) and co-editor of Seasonal Dimensions to Rural
Poverty
Gill Gordon is a Visiting Fellow at the IDS. attached to the Health
Group She is developing problem-posing training materials for
village health workers in Ghana, based on needs identified with
communities in 1984. She worked as a district nutritionist in the
savanna of Nigeria and Ghana from 1966-75. where she grappled
with the problems of responding to seasonal changes in needs and
resources She is co-author of Puppets for Better Health (Macmillan.
1986) and has written many articles on participatory nutrition
education.
Camilla Toulmin undertook two years of fieldwork in Mali from
1980-82. This research provides the basis for her DPhil thesis
(Oxford) to be submitted shortly. She is currently a Research Officer
at the Overseas Development Institute working on problems of
irrigation management.
Jeremy Swift, a Fellow of IDS. is an economist/anthropologist
interested in and land and mountain pastoralism He has recently
worked in northern Kenya and the Horn of Africa on contingency
planning against drought and famine, and on the rehabilitation of
pastoral economies. He has a long-term interest in building
appropriate local institutions lor development among pastoralists.
He has recently completed a research project on increased market
integration of Sahelian pastoral economies under the title Pastoral
Development in Central Niger.
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