This Action Against Hunger briefing paper argues that planning for seasonality is an important, though often ignored, principle of smart development. Most of the world’s poor live in rural areas and work in agricultural and livestock economies. For these households, poverty, hunger and illness are highly dynamic phenomena, changing dramatically over the course of a year in response to production, price and climatic cycles. As a result, most of the world’s acute hunger occurs not in conflicts and natural disasters but in that annually recurring time of the year called the “hunger season,” the period when the previous year’s harvest stocks have dwindled and little food is available on the market, causing prices to shoot upward.
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