The next two chapters examine some of the strategies that rural people have developed for coping with seasonality problems at the meso- and macro-environmental levels respectively. In the present chapter the experience of the developed world will be cited where appropriate, for this can sometimes contain important lessons – and caveats – for Third World countries today. Needless to say this is not meant to imply that solutions appropriate to the developed world should be introduced uncritically into poorer countries. Nor should the fact that a fairly large number of different ways of coping with seasonality have historically been developed, be taken to suggest that problems of seasonality can easily be solved; far less that they have been solved already. Traditional counter-seasonal strategies are often a case simply of making the best of a bad situation, and even many of these approaches are nowadays coming under increasing threat.

The discussion begins with what is probably the oldest counter-seasonal measure, post-harvest storage (with or without processing) of surplus production for use in the hungry season. Storage here is defined to include savings, since this is basically the storage of the value of commodities in the form of money.

Storage and processing

It was argued in Chapter One that the most serious seasonality problem of the poor and the disadvantaged is that of marked fluctuations in the consumption of food and other essentials about an already low mean.