Stages 1-4    Seasonality    Armed Conflict    Natural Disasters

A distinction must be made in the assessment of food security between seasonal fluctuations and the "spiral down" (progressively more drastic coping strategies practiced due to worsening food security). Seasonal food insecurity is a somewhat common occurrence where households employ stage one coping strategies during certain times of the year (for example, non-harvesting periods), due to the lack of available food stores or resources to obtain food. This situation may occur every year, and as mentioned earlier, depending on the level of vulnerability of a household, transitory periods of food insecurity may precipitate the chronic condition. A household that cannot cope with seasonality in this way may be thought of as ‘fragile’, while a household that weathers such periodic crises is more ‘resilient’ (Oshaug, 1988).

The graph above illustrates food stores over the course of a year. The peaks are times when harvest has just been completed and households have the greatest amount of food stored. In the situation represented here, the harvesting season begins in late May/early June and ends in late August/early September (CARE Somalia, 1999). Accounting for seasonal patterns is crucial, as can be seen here, because one can look at the current situation and compare it to typical production/stores to observe whether the situation is seasonally normal. During the times of low food stores we might expect households to be practicing stage one coping strategies, and because it is known that this is a seasonal pattern we would not be alarmed. Yet, seasonal fluctuations can leave a household more vulnerable to serious food insecurity, thus interventions may be targeted to places at greater risk of becoming severely food insecure, at times when vulnerability is greatest.

In addition, graphing food stores (or whatever the outcome variable may be) over time and comparing between years can illuminate any trends that may be occurring, such as progressively worse production over a 3 year period. This information can be important because it may show that although a program may be successful over a short period of time (say 6 months to a year), the outcome of production continues to worsen.