2.8.4: At Home and Abroad - The Hunger Season
- Page ID
- 258065
This page is a draft and is under active development.
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By the end of this section, you will be able to:
- Define the hunger season and explain how it impacts residents in both Low-Income Countries and those with higher income
A Global Experience: The Hunger Season
The “hunger or lean season” is a term that has been used to describe an experience common to those who feed themselves through subsistence farming. The “hunger or lean season” refers to the period of time between planting and harvest when preserved food stores from the prior year dwindle and food becomes scarce. The food from last year has been consumed through the winter months and the food being grown is not yet ripe enough to eat. The specific months of this season vary by region, but the experience remains common around the world in the Twenty-first Century.
You might ask, with larger and larger percentages of the world being connected with major agri-food systems, how many people could the hunger season actually impact? New research from the FAO demonstrates how common subsistence and small-holding agriculture actaully is. In 2021, a report indicated that 35 percent of all food grown on earth is produced on farms of no more than 2 hectares (or roughly 5 acres) (Lowder, et.al, 2021). Additional information indicates that an extremely large portion of the world population is employed by agri-food systems, with 857 million people involved directly in agriculture (FAO, 2021). These indirect measures indicate a continued reliance in many regions on subsistence agriculture, along with continued vulnerability to hunger as food stores wane.
Impact on the Children in the U.S.
In the United States, although few continue to rely on subsistence agriculture to feed their families, we too have a hunger season. It is the period of time between the end of school in May or June and its start in August or September. As the hunger season aligns with the traditional summer break of American schoolchildren it should not come as a surprise that it disproportionately impacts children. Feeding America, which advocates for policies that curb hunger and distributes food to the hungry, estimates that 22 million children in the United States were impacted by what they call “summer hunger” in 2022. During the COVID-19 pandemic, many state and local governments had to grapple with the reliance of many families on low or no cost school breakfasts and lunches in a new way as schools closed and this version of the “hunger season” threatened to stretch beyond what families could accommodate. Many communities scrambled to offer free breakfasts and lunches in parks or other spaces that could be made relatively safe during the pandemic, and the U.S. Department of Agriculture created a website to help families find locations, which the agency continues to use each summer.
New attention was paid to the ways in which children rely on their schools for more than instruction. With greater awareness of how important school food programs can be, many states have acted to expand these social safety net programs. In 2021, largely in response to the COVID-19 pandemic, California became the first state in the country to provide free lunches for all public school children in the state. Since then 7 states have followed suit: Maine, Minnesota, Massachusetts, Colorado, Vermont, and Michigan. Legislation to prohibit school lunch debt, which can result in schools denying meals to students, has been proposed by legislators in Congress.
Impact on Children Globally
Working adults are often prioritized in the distribution of food because their labor is necessary to secure additional resources for the family as they tend crops that will provide future food or work for the wages necessary to purchase food. This is why the hunger season can be particularly impactful for children (World Food Program USA, 2021). For children who already receive less from familial food distribution, any form of crisis, conflict, or blight that extends the hunger season by interrupting agricultural production, can be catastrophic. The best way to improve food security among children is often to reduce the length of the hunger season. The United States is not alone in attempting to address the hunger season with school lunches.
Around the world, countries are adopting a similar approach to providing this necessary support for hungry school-aged children. In 2020, the World Food Programme (WFP) was in the process of scaling up school feeding programs in 10 countries worldwide, while also working with governments to hand back supervision of similar programs in 70 additional countries. In describing its efforts to ensure school children have access to healthy, well-balanced meals, the World Food Programme described an important indirect positive effect of the programs: school feeding programs help to stabilize food markets during difficult times, like the COVID-19 pandemic, by ensuring that there is consistent demand for products that are often grown in local farms. The money that countries commit to spending to provide wholesome meals for school-aged children ultimately flows into agricultural communities and helps to maintain higher prices for agricultural goods. In some countries, programs are required to use local produce, ensuring an additional benefit for workers in the local agri-food system.
The World Food Programme produces regular reports describing the scale of school feeding programs worldwide. According to the 2022 report, 418 million school children around the globe rely on school lunches, costing approximately $48 billion (World Food Programme, 2022). All told, school feeding programs are likely the largest social support program in the world. However, these programs continue to be most common in high- and medium-income countries, with low-income countries lagging significantly behind. According to WFP data, 61 percent of children in high-income countries have access to a school feeding program, while only 39 percent of children in lower middle-income countries and 18 percent of children in low-income countries have similar access. Obviously, this leaves many of the most vulnerable children unprotected. On the bright side, the World Food Programme tracked a 15 percent increase in the amount of money dedicated to school feeding among low-income countries between 2020 and 2022, suggesting that the poorest nations of the world are prioritizing this mode of protecting children from hunger. Unfortunately during the same period, international donations to support these programs fell by nearly 20 percent, including a decline in the amount of international aid provided by the United States for such programs.