Locally they’re called “Los Meses Flacos” or “The Thin Months”.  The research term is “food insecure”, or “food scarcity”, and we measure it by months that families have “adequate household food provisioning”.  All of these terms are ways to say that families are hungry that they don’t have enough food to eat, or money to buy food. It’s a common situation in coffee-growing communities especially during the rainy season when income from the coffee harvest has been depleted and the price of grain is high. 

The extent of los meses flacos was documented in 2007 by the International Center for Tropical Agriculture (CIAT) and Keurig Green Mountain (KGM) who found that sixty-seven percent of surveyed coffee farmers in Mexico, Guatemala, and Nicaragua faced extreme food scarcity for three to eight months of the year. In response, KGM invested $15 million into food security programs such as diversified food crops, kitchen gardens, and alternative livelihood strategies.  In 2013 CIAT and Gund Fellow, Ernesto Méndez’s Agroecology and Rural Livelihoods Group (ARLG) returned to interview many of the same coffee growers to assess changes in seasonal hunger.  They found that on average the months of seasonal hunger experienced by study participants decreased from 3.81 in 2007 to 2.83 in 2013.

These findings were released “The Thin Months Revisited”, and now in a policy brief, “Revisiting the ‘Thin Months’ – A Follow-up Study on the Livelihoods of Mesoamerican Coffee Farmers”. The policy brief examines what worked, what barriers remain, and what policies and practices are necessary to continue to address this problem in coffee growing regions.