Most of the harvesting of the main season crop has been completed and drying is being done. Christine reported that, as usual at every harvest and because the storehouse has not been built, the women farmers have had to sell off their crops from the main season as soon as the crops were dried because they have no place to store the bags of grain, other than one or two bags saved for food. The middle men who bring trucks and scales to the villages to buy grain as soon as it has been dried are paying only $0.21 per kg of maize (about $0.095 per lb) right now. After a few months, when the food maize that a farmer has saved from his own crop to feed his family runs out, he will have to buy at high price on the open market until the next harvest is ready. Even now, the price of maize in the market is actually $0.39 per lb. So the middle men can get a price that is 400% higher if they buy at the farm gate and sell in the market now, and the price will likely rise more as time goes on.
Most farmers have kept enough of their main season harvest to last until the second or small season crop is harvested in November-December, so there is not likely to be a “hungry season” before harvest of the second season crop that starts about November. But the months are long between harvest of the small season crops in Nov-Dec and the harvest of the main season crop, which starts about July. It is in the three or four months from April to July that subsistence farm families run out of food and must buy at high prices in the market. To avoid that expenditure of precious money or to avoid going into debt to feed the family, the women farmers reduce the amount of food in a meal. Sometimes there is only a cup of tea, eventually without milk or sugar. Sometimes it is cassava from their garden. Sometimes the family has a small but real meal only once a day and sometimes there is no food at all at mealtime. This is the time farm families go into debt to feed the family and children lose weight and can’t do their schoolwork because they are hungry.