Hunger & Hard Times

How the U.N. is helping poor farmers
overcome the lean season

Abdul Majid is a smallholder farmer from Badakhshan, Afghanistan, a region known for its harsh terrain and relentless winters often lasting for more than half the year.

Each November, Abdul and his family brace for the start of the annual lean season, the period between harvests when food supply runs low and — during especially hard times — runs out completely. During the lean season, the act of putting food on the table is a daily struggle.

“I have only a small plot of land. What I can grow is hardly enough to feed my family of seven for just two months,” Majid says.

Men and women in Bamyan, Afghanistan, above, have planted more than 30,000 tree saplings as part of a WFP project to prevent soil erosion. The site is also home to a WFP-sponsored watershed project to address flooding in the area, where all five of Afghanistan’s most important rivers originate. During the summer, the 123-acre site provides employment and food assistance for as many as 300 people from surrounding villages.​ (©WFP/Silke Buhr).

Fortunately, through an initiative sponsored by the U.N. World Food Programme (WFP), Abdul is able to work on a community development project that plants tree saplings. In exchange for his work, Abdul and his family receive life-saving food rations that tide them over during the long and arduous lean season. Once grown, the timber can be harvested for home improvement or sold for extra income.

Lean seasons are not a new phenomenon.

Farming families throughout history have experienced cyclical periods when their food supply dwindles and hunger looms. Lean seasons can be the result of natural weather patterns or climatic shocks like droughts or floods, which impede crop growth. These spells of food insecurity can also be caused by a family’s inability to safely store crops after they’ve been harvested.

Extreme drought can be devastating for poor farmers and their families. In order to cope, the most vulnerable are often forced to slaughter or sell the few productive livestock they own — chickens, cows, goats — to survive the lean season. ​(L to R: ©WFP/Rein Skullerud, Niger; ©WFP/Marcus Prior, Kenya).

Whatever the cause, the devastating consequences of a lean season can still be overcome.

In fact, the U.S. has created a variety of programs over the years to keep hunger at bay for farming communities. For example, the U.S. Department of Agriculture supports farms in America with disaster relief assistance and crop insurance. These programs serve as a safeguard when harvest yields are low, unpredictable weather produces poor-quality crops or harvests succumb to contamination by insect pests, bacteria or fungi.

Today, three quarters of the world’s poor live in rural areas where agriculture is the sole livelihood. It is this same group — many of whom are small-scale farmers like Abdul — that are disproportionately affected by lean seasons and resulting bouts of hunger. These same farmers are also the least likely to enjoy social protections like crop insurance because many of these programs simply do not exist in the world’s poorest communities.

Luckily, WFP has established programs in Afghanistan and around the world to help support families like Abdul who need extra assistance when food runs short.

Below is an overview of three countries where WFP staffers are helping families cope — and even thrive — despite these challenges.

By providing food assistance to Bangladeshi women in exchange for work constructing road embankments, WFP is helping entire communities build resilience against future floods. This is especially important in Bangladesh, a low-lying coastal nation that is particularly susceptible to extreme weather events like typhoons and floods. (©WFP/Ranak Martin)

Preparing For Disaster

Bangladesh is one of the most disaster-prone countries in the world. It also happens to be on the front lines of climate change. With an already long monsoon season and increasingly frequent natural disasters like typhoons and floods, poor farmers in Bangladesh are particularly vulnerable to the hardships of a lean season.

In response, WFP’s Food for Assets (FFA) team is working with the Local Government Engineering Department to improve community resilience to natural disasters and boost agriculture production. One project provides food rations and cash to roughly 1,800 impoverished people, mostly women, in exchange for work and training activities aimed at disaster-risk reduction, like building irrigation canals or raising roads.

L to R: A rural Bangladeshi woman tends to a local garden using seed-planting techniques she learned from a WFP workshop; Bangladeshi men and women collect grains from WFP after a hard day’s work; A group of rural women re-construct a road embankment in the Kishorgari region of Palashabari Sub-district in Bangladesh, which will protect the roadway from future flooding, enabling year-round transportation for the entire community, including children getting to and from school. (©WFP/Rein Skullerud)

WFP is helping Bangladeshi entrepreneurs like Omela Rai, a sheep farmer, by providing food assistance in exchange for skills-building workshops.(©WFP/Ranak Martin)

The program has been transformative for both the communities and the participants. Take Sima Rani Das, a group leader for the Saemaul Zero Hunger Community Project. Her team has worked on a variety of projects that include constructing or repairing embankments, raising roads, excavating irrigation canals or lifting homesteads. In return, they receive food and cash from WFP. Projects like these help protect homes and fields during the annual monsoon season when regular flooding occurs.

Using tools and techniques provided by WFP, farmers in Dhulipara, Bangladesh, separate wheat from the chaff using a basic motorized thresher that minimizes post-harvest loss. (©WFP/Rein Skullerud)

Last year, Sima worked 78 days and received more than 340 pounds of rice, 35 pounds of pulses, 18 pounds of oil and about 4,500 taka (USD $58) as payment for her work. In Sima’s village $58 goes pretty far, for example 12 eggs can be bought for less than $1 and a carton of milk is only 50 cents. Now, her entire community will be better equipped to handle natural disasters in the future. The program has also empowered Sima and the other women on her team. They have been able to increase their family’s food security throughout the year and boost household income, helping reduce the risk of future lean seasons.

Etched onto the wall of a chicken coup in Chikondi, Malawi is the name of a local female farmers club. WFP’s Purchase For Progress program helps farmers associations like these by providing better training and tools, like drought-resilient seeds, so their farms can withstand weather shocks. (©WFP/Charles Hatch-Barnwell)

L to R: A small-scale farmer in Malawi scoops dried maize that she has turned into flour to sell at a local market. Nearby, children stand next to her traditional grain silo. Parents in impoverished countries like Malawi are often forced to remove their children — especially daughters — from school at a young age so they can work to put food on the table, thus trapping whole families in a cycle of poverty. (©WFP/Charles Hatch Barnwell)

Feeding Families In Need

Malawi is a small, landlocked country in southeastern Africa that is plagued by endemic poverty. Like Bangladesh, the majority — about 80% — of families in Malawi depend on small-scale agriculture.

Malawi’s landholdings are generally small and densely cultivated, causing widespread overuse and degradation of the land. Deforestation rates hover around 2.8 percent annually — the highest in southern Africa. As a result, the country suffers an even greater risk of flooding and soil erosion during the annual rainy season.

This does not bode well for the majority of Malawi’s population, who depend on agriculture to survive and are therefore especially vulnerable to the country’s volatile weather patterns like dry spells and flooding. Therefore, large parts of Malawi regularly suffer from chronic hunger, particularly during the lean season from December and March. During that time, food supplies diminish as a result of insufficient household crop production. At the same time, food prices in local markets tend to spike as demand for crops produced outside of family farms increases.

For the past 50 years, WFP has addressed Malawi’s widespread poverty, unpredictable weather and market conditions by employing a wide range of programs to boost food availability and affordability. When locally grown food is unavailable, WFP provides food baskets containing staples like grains and cooking oil. When local food is available but unaffordable for the poorest families, WFP provides cash or vouchers, which don’t disrupt functional markets and can even act to stimulate local economies.

The Jali-Phalombe was one of five major roadways destroyed by last year’s floods in Malawi, which left rural families and farmers alike cut off from access to markets and food. (©WFP/Steve Khuleya, Malawi)

WFP typically scales up its assistance in Malawi during the lean months that run from January through March. But the 2014–2015 lean season was particularly brutal. Severe floods plagued the southern districts of Malawi, affecting more than 1.1 million people, submerging more than 1.5 million acres of land and prolonging the lean season by more than 2 months.

In response, WFP distributed emergency food rations of maize, beans, Super Cereal and fortified vegetable oil to nearly 450,000 people. By April, WFP also began providing cash and food vouchers to flood-affected families as farms recovered and began harvesting new crops. This allowed Malawi’s poorest families to purchase locally grown food.

In late May, Lanesi Mlauzi, 26, received cash and voucher assistance from WFP and a grassroots NGO partner at a local school.

“I left my village at 6 a.m. to get here early so that I could leave in good time to take care of my family,” the mother of four said.

Thanks to this type of assistance, Mlauzi can now purchase fresh groceries like locally caught fish, which are rich in protein, while also boosting local markets.

L to R: A farmer tends to her crops using a handmade spade fashioned out of local wood. Agriculture remains the main employment sector and income source throughout rural Burkina Faso, where 80% of the population resides. Small-scale, subsistence-oriented family farming accounts for 70% of the country’s total agricultural production. Hamidou Maïga participates in a WFP Food-for-Work project in Bani, Burkina Faso, that prevents soil degradation and helps retain rain water. (©WFP/Anne Poulsen)

Harvesting Hope

Burkina Faso, located in West Africa, is also susceptible to recurrent natural disasters such as drought, floods and locust invasions, which have grown increasingly frequent over the past few years. In addition, desertification in drought-prone areas is rapidly spreading, affecting the availability of water and pasture — exacerbating lean seasons for Burkina Faso’s poorest families.

One way to help prevent small-holder farmers from experiencing the devastating effects of a harsh lean season is to mitigate post-harvest loss. In fact, almost one-third of all crops grown in sub-Saharan Africa are lost each year due to inadequate post-harvest management and household storage. This is a solvable problem that WFP is tackling head on.

In addition to increasing food production, WFP’s Purchase for Progress (P4P) program promotes better techniques and tools for food preservation. Simple and inexpensive steps like educating farmers about the grain-drying process, proper grain-bagging and how to use improved storage infrastructure like metal silos have helped reduce food loss.

“Through P4P I have learned more about grain quality and how I can make farming into my business. Now agriculture helps me and my family earn more income than before,” says Hadija Yusuph, a P4P-supported farmer in Tanzania.

After completing a successful trial run last year on its post-harvest loss initiative, WFP is now scaling up the project to reach 41,000 farming households in Burkina Faso and Uganda.

L to R: A farmer in Guatemala named Hugo Jolón holds up an ear of corn stunted by drought (©WFP/Francisco Fion). Meanwhile, in Malawi, a healthy wheat fields awaits harvest. (©WFP/Charles Hatch Barnwell, Malawi)

L to R: In Malawi’s Mchinji district, a female farmer holds a handful of freshly harvested maize. While the majority of the world’s small-scale farmers are women, gender inequality means this same group is disproportionately at risk for chronic hunger. WFP estimates that if women farmers had access to the same resources as men, global hunger could be reduced by 150 million people. (©WFP/Charles Hatch-Barnwell)

A Hunger-Free Future

WFP’s work helping small-scale farmers adapt to unpredictable and extreme weather conditions could not be more timely. U.N. research has shown that climate change will continue to increase the intensity of natural disasters like typhoons, droughts and floods.

To make matters worse, climate change will disproportionately impact already impoverished people. There are two reasons for this. First, many poor countries are located in disaster-prone regions. Second, most poverty-stricken areas lack the infrastructure, early response systems and resources to safeguard against crisis.

This is coupled with an explosion in population. Current projections estimate that by 2050, 9 billion people will inhabit the globe — nearly a 30% increase from today. Feeding this many people will require the world’s farmers to grow more food than has been grown in all of human history.

This is where WFP comes in.

WFP staffers on the ground are working every day to create a future of zero hunger for all people. Thanks to the agency’s lifesaving food assistance programs, families like Abdul’s and Sima’s will be more resilient when the next flood, drought or harsh winter strikes.

Because when it comes to hard times, no family should go hungry.

By M.J. Altman and Katherine Frank
World Food Program USA