The hungry season arrives when food from the prior harvest begins to run low. When our cupboards are bare, we can go to a store and stock up. In the world's poorest communities, where people already spend up to 80 percent of their household income on food, that's not always an option.

Poverty is the primary cause of hunger and hungry seasons, but not the only cause. Poverty conspires with other factors like war, gender discrimination, disasters and climate change to strengthen hunger's deadly grip.

CARE is rolling back the hungry season around the world. Click the button on the right to learn how.

After Sierra Leone's devastating civil war, survivors returned to their villages to find their homes destroyed and their farm plots overgrown. They replanted but the crops didn't produce enough food. The hungry season returned - and earlier than normal.

Yanka Sesay describes the toll the two-month hungry season took on her children. "We'd be down to one meal a day, just a little rice in the morning," she said. "At night, my children would get so hungry they would sit in the corner and cry."

One of hunger's cruelest tricks is that it reinforces itself. Farm families would often sell shares of their upcoming rice harvest at rock bottom prices just to gather a little cash. By selling some of their rice before it was harvested, they only increased the likelihood they'd run out of rice the following year.

And families forced to spend their last pennies on food usually don't have the means to keep their children in school or vaccinate them. With no education or protection from debilitating diseases, hungry children are more likely to grow into hungry adults - if they survive.

CARE's field schools taught farmers sustainable, conservation agriculture techniques that made their fields more productive. CARE also introduced rice seeds that grow in less than three months, instead of the usual five. This allows farmers to get two harvests during the area's six-month growing season.

Now that so many farmers and their families are free from fear of the hungry season, they're able to save money, send their kids to school and plan for their futures.

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Climate change is a much more complex issue than even alarming reports of record high global temperatures suggest. Increasingly unstable and unpredictable weather patterns are making it more difficult for farmers in the developing world to plant food at the optimum time. And rainy seasons that come too little, too late or not at all are making it harder for many communities to stay fed, much less earn a good living.

In the highlands of Ecuador, warming isn't necessarily the biggest climate change-related problem for farmers. Often it's a change in rain patterns or surprise frosts that kill plants already in the ground. Once self-sustaining farmers have found themselves slipping deeper into poverty in recent years. To make ends meet, farm families began heading to towns in search of menial work, or to beg. Community health deteriorated as more and more people became undernourished and more susceptible to illness. Traditional ways of living off the land was heading into extinction.

CARE offers farmers throughout the Andes sustainable solutions to help them adapt to the changing climate. CARE shows farmers how they can plant trees to protect their crops from wind and frost; teaches them how to build low-cost greenhouses to help feed their families year-round; and helps them collect water for drinking and irrigation with screens that catch fog rolling down the mountain.

Communities that once seemed on the verge of losing their traditional way of life are again buzzing with anticipation of bountiful harvests season after season.

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Earning a living for yourself and your children during a war that destroyed most of your family and crippled much of your country is a daunting task faced by millions of people around the world. History, both recent and distant, proves that war widens and intensifies poverty.

Imagine how much harder the task would be if your culture, or even your country's laws, made it a de facto crime for you to work?

Decades of war have made widows of an estimated 2 million women in Afghanistan. Because of cultural and legal restrictions, the ability of these widows work or even leave their homes is often severely restricted.

In 1994, CARE first began distributing desperately-needed food rations and emergency aid to female-headed households in Afghanistan. To ensure the program was sustainable and the participants could eventually support themselves, CARE developed a program to train women in vocations, such as sewing, animal-rearing and gardening. Because these jobs are home-based, the women are able to earn a living in a culturally-accepted manner.

The program also helps women form savings and loan groups. As a collective, they're able to get better deals from creditors and vendors to help expand their businesses and increase their income.

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Erratic rains and an attack of pests destroyed entire harvests across the Sahel region of West Africa at the end of 2011. As a result, millions of families across this already chronically poor and underdeveloped area were left reeling. Communities in the Sahel are used to tough times. But families began to see their 2012 hungry season start as early as February and March, whereas it usually ran from May or June until the millet harvest in September.

Some local markets had food, but with prices near record highs, few people could supplement their meager meals with purchased food. A field study by humanitarian groups in the region reported children were being pulled out of school in huge numbers as families abandoned their villages in search of work in cities, or because the children themselves were sent to seek work. At the peak of the Sahel crisis, more than 18 million people were in need of emergency assistance.

CARE's emergency response and recovery program in the Sahel reached more than 750,000 people last year with programs, such as our innovative cash-for-work program. The program allowed farmers to earn money for food by drought-proofing their farms and helping their neighbors do the same. The program offered immediate relief from hunger while preparing communities by building their long-term resilience. And by eschewing costly food imports, CARE was able to reach more people with critical assistance while supporting local food production and markets. At the same time CARE's long-term development programs, including women-led savings groups and cereal banks, helped people build and protect their assets.

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work around the world >

Nobody should have to go to bed hungry tonight.

Please join us in rolling back the hungry season - and fighting the root causes of hunger and poverty - by making your generous donation today.