FROM LONG-TERM PATTERNS OF SEASONAL HUNGER TO CHANGING EXPERIENCES OF EVERYDAY POVERTY: NORTHEASTERN GHANA C. 1930–2000

Abstract

This article is a West African case-study of the nutritional history of everyday poverty. It draws on unusually rich statistical evidence collected in northeastern Ghana. In the 1930s, pioneer colonial surveys revealed that seasonal poor diet was pervasive, by contrast with undernourishment. They pave the way for constructing a new set of anthropometric data in Nangodi, a savanna polity where John Hunter completed a classic study of seasonal hunger in the 1960s. A re-survey of the same sections and lineages c. 2000, during a full agricultural cycle, shows a significant improvement in nutritional statuses, notably for women.

The biological standard of living in early nineteenth‐century West Africa: new anthropometric evidence for northern Ghana and Burkina Faso1

“…2 2 In different ways by Destombes, ‘Nutrition and hunger’; idem, ‘Seasonal hunger’; G. Austin, J. Baten, and A. Moradi, ‘Exploring the evolution of living standards in Ghana, 1880–2000: an anthropometric approach’, working paper, London School of Economics/Tuebingen Univ. (2007); Moradi, ‘Confronting’. …”