Fighting Seasonal Hunger in Zambia: Better smoothing through better planning?

Can a simple planning intervention help maize farmers in Zambia save more of their harvest for lean times?

This post was written by CEGA Program Manager Kristina Hallez, with contributions from Kelsey Jack (Associate Professor, UC Santa Barbara), Nicholas Swanson (PhD Student, UC Berkeley), and Supreet Kaur (Assistant Professor, UC Berkeley).

Village in Eastern Province, Zambia. (Credit: Nicholas Swanson)

Seasonal hunger is especially devastating in low- and middle-income countries with large farming sectors. In Zambia, for example, CEGA affiliate Kelsey Jack and co-authors, found that over 80% households run out of maize before their next harvest (Fink, Jack and Masiye 2018). In the months preceding the next harvest, a period referred to as the “hungry season,” households resort to a variety of coping mechanisms, including skipping meals, and selling family labor to the detriment of production on their own farm.

Seasonal hunger has serious impacts on health, well-being and economic outcomes among farming communities. Some research suggests that people exposed to more seasonal fluctuations in diet are shorter as adults and reach lower levels of education (Christian and Dillon 2018). Further, there may be gendered impacts of children skipping meals, with evidence that families give calories preferentially to sons over daughters during lean seasons (Behrman 1988). In times of seasonal hunger, households resort to coping strategies that might provide short-term relief but can exacerbate conditions of poverty in the long-term. Household members may take up external wage labor jobs instead of working on their own farms (Fink, Jack and Masiye 2018) and sell assets such as livestock (Mayanja et al. 2015, Rademacher-Schulz et al. 2014, Zug 2006). During periods of seasonal hunger, farming households sometimes resort to harvesting immature crops, which reduces crop yield and nutritional value, and may perpetuate hunger (Anderson et al. 2018).

Previous research, supported by CEGA and J-PAL’s Agricultural Technology Adoption Initiative (ATAI), has explored easing credit constraints to combat the effects of seasonal food scarcity. One prior study involved offering food and cash loans during the hungry season and found that agricultural output and consumption increased, people were less likely to work away from their own farms, and local wages went up. Based on these encouraging results, they are further exploring the possibilities around expanding farmers’ access to such kinds of credit during the lean season.

Other promising routes toward easing seasonal hunger involve applying insights from psychology to development interventions. Supreet Kaur⁠ — Scientific Director of CEGA’s Psychology and Economics of Poverty (PEP) Initiative⁠ — Ned Augenblick and Nick Swanson at UC Berkeley, Kelsey Jack at UC Santa Barbara, and Felix Masiye at the University of Zambia aim to test whether a simple, low-cost planning intervention helps farming households save more of their harvest. In particular, the project asks why many farmers do not save more of their harvest income for later in their year, to help them “smooth” their consumption over time.

To answer this question, the researchers started by investigating farmers’ expectations about how long their harvest would last. Preliminary evidence from the team suggests that, at harvest time, farmers are over-optimistic about how long their harvested grain will last them. Despite decades of experience, this over-optimism recurs year after year. This suggests that farmers engage in a phenomenon psychologists term the “planning fallacy” (Kahneman 2011, Buehler et al. 2010, Kahneman and Tversky 1977). However, evidence from psychology also suggests over-optimism can be tempered, by “unpacking” or “segmenting” the components of our plans and explicitly considering our past experiences to plan for the future more realistically (Kruger and Evans 2004).

An illustrative project supported through CEGA’s Psychology and Economics of Poverty Initiative, this research focuses on addressing the psychological mechanisms that may make dealing with seasonality challenging as a way to design low-cost and impactful interventions. To test whether this mechanism might be at play, the research team is conducting experiments with farming households, where some households undergo a planning intervention that aims to help individuals to think through their consumption patterns and actively formulate a plan right after the harvest (when they have the most maize), while keeping in mind future expenditures and possible shocks.

Hungry season planning board in Zambia. (Credit: Nicholas Swanson)

The intervention uses a visual planning board (left) to help households plan how to allocate their maize and marking the board with their estimated expenditures across different categories for the year. Households then attach labels to their bags of maize to correspond to each estimated expenditure category. To gauge the impact of the intervention, the study team will survey households throughout the year, measuring household consumption levels, child health and development, farm investment and output and changes in farmers’ beliefs about how much maize they are able to save. The intervention could lead to greater maize savings over the year, helping ensure there is more food for consumption during the lean season, allowing farmers to buy productive farm inputs (like fertilizer), and ensuring that household members can work more on their own farms instead of finding wage-work elsewhere.

This project has received additional funding from the UC Davis Feed the Future Innovation Lab Markets, Risk and Resilience Program, International Growth Center, National Science Foundation, Weiss Family Foundation and an anonymous donor.

References:

Anderson CL, Reynolds T, Merfeld JD, et al. 2018. Relating seasonal hunger and prevention and coping strategies: A panel analysis of Malawian farm households. J Dev Stud. Oct 3;54(10):1737–55.

Behrman JR. 1988. Intrahousehold allocation of nutrients in rural India: Are boys favored? Do parents exhibit inequality aversion? Oxf Econ Pap. Mar 1;40(1):32–54.

Buehler R, Griffin D, Peetz J. 2010. The Planning fallacy: Cognitive, motivational, and social origins. In Advances in experimental social psychology. Jan 1 (Vol. 43, pp. 1–62). Academic Press.

Christian P, Dillon B. 2018. Growing and learning when consumption is seasonal: long-term evidence from Tanzania. Demography. Jun 1;55(3):1091–118.

Fink G, Jack BK, Masiye F. 2018. Seasonal Liquidity, Rural Labor Markets and Agricultural Production. NBER WP 24564. 2018 Apr.

Kahneman D. 2011. Thinking, fast and slow. Macmillan; Oct 25.

Kahneman D, Tversky A. 1977. Intuitive prediction: Biases and corrective procedures. Decision Research Technical Report PTR-1042–77–6.

Kruger J, Evans M. 2004. If you don’t want to be late, enumerate: Unpacking reduces the planning fallacy. J Exper Soc Psy. Sep 1;40(5):586–98.

Mayanja MN, Rubaire-Akiiki C, Greiner T, et al. 2015. Characterising food insecurity in pastoral and agro-pastoral communities in Uganda using a consumption coping strategy index. Pastoralism. Dec;5(1):11.

Rademacher-Schulz C, Schraven B, Mahama ES. 2014. Time matters: shifting seasonal migration in Northern Ghana in response to rainfall variability and food insecurity. Clim Dev. Jan 2;6(1):46–52.

Zug S. 2006. Monga-seasonal food insecurity in Bangladesh: Bringing the information together. J Soc Stud-Dhaka. Jul;111:21.