Compare methods

	Seasonal Food Availability Calendar	Rapid Market Appraisal
Field	Food Agriculture Studies	Food Agriculture Studies
Family	Process / pipeline	Process / pipeline
Year of origin	1994	2007
Originator	Robert Chambers (Participatory Rural Appraisal tradition)	John Holtzman and the rapid-appraisal marketing tradition; FAO agrifood-chain guidelines
Type	Participatory visual mapping of seasonal variation in food and livelihoods	Rapid, iterative field-appraisal pipeline for market and value-chain diagnosis
Seminal source	Chambers, R. (1994). The origins and practice of participatory rural appraisal. World Development, 22(7), 953-969.	da Silva, C. A., & de Souza Filho, H. M. (2007). Guidelines for Rapid Appraisals of Agrifood Chain Performance in Developing Countries. Agricultural Management, Marketing and Finance Occasional Paper 20. Rome: FAO.
Aliases	Seasonal Calendar, Participatory Seasonal Calendar, Seasonality Mapping, Food Availability Calendar	RMA, Rapid Reconnaissance of Agricultural Markets, Rapid Agrifood Chain Appraisal, Subsector Rapid Appraisal
Related	3	4
Summary	The Seasonal Food Availability Calendar is a participatory field method, rooted in Robert Chambers's Participatory Rural Appraisal (PRA), in which community members themselves construct a visual chart of how food, livelihoods, and stresses vary across the year. Along a time axis of months or local seasons, participants map the timing and relative intensity of rainfall, planting and harvests, food stocks, market prices, labor demand, hunger, and illness, often using stones, beans, or marks to score each period. The resulting calendar makes the community's lean season visible and explains its drivers — when harvests run out, prices spike, work disappears, and hunger peaks. It is valued for surfacing local knowledge about seasonality that surveys taken at one point in time cannot capture.	Rapid market appraisal (RMA) is a fast, low-cost, interdisciplinary field method for diagnosing how agricultural markets and value chains perform and where their binding constraints lie. Rooted in the rapid-reconnaissance marketing tradition associated with John Holtzman and codified for value chains in FAO's 2007 guidelines by Carlos da Silva and Hildo de Souza Filho, RMA trades the comprehensiveness of a formal survey for speed and flexibility: a small team scopes the commodity system, mines existing data to form hypotheses about constraints, and then conducts iterative semi-structured interviews with actors all along the chain — producers, traders, processors, transporters, retailers, and support services — refining its understanding as it goes and triangulating across sources. The product is a timely, actionable diagnosis of market structure, conduct, and performance that can guide investment, policy, or project design when a slow census-style study is neither affordable nor warranted.