Hunger Hotspots: Identifying Those Most in Need in Time to Help

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Editor’s note: At this writing, the future of FEWS NET is not clear. While some related data is now online, the FEWS NET website is offline. To date, the State Department has not issued a statement.

FEWS NET, the Famine Early Warning Systems Network, was established by the U.S. government during the Reagan administration. In the aftermath of the devastating 1984 famine in Ethiopia, the goal was to enable people in communities at risk, national governments, and the international humanitarian assistance community to avoid having to confront future disasters unexpectedly and while unprepared. 

FEWS NET has always been administered by the U.S. Agency for International Development (USAID). It was shut down in the opening weeks of the Trump administration, and its work to help save lives during hunger emergencies stopped amid the administration’s effort to dismantle USAID.

“[Losing FEWS NET] is like having a truck full of grain but taking the steering wheel away. The FEWS maps are the steering wheel for the aid programs. They tell you where to go.”    
– Andrew Natsios, Administrator of USAID during the George W. Bush administration 

Bread for the World is a longtime supporter of FEWS NET’s work. In the past, this usually took the form of urging policymakers to heed FEWS NET warnings in time to provide effective humanitarian assistance. Three years ago in April 2022, for example, Bread’s piece Improving Responses to Hunger Emergencies explained how FEWS NET supported quicker responses to the hunger crises emerging in the aftermath of the COVID-19 pandemic.

The article pointed out that during the first famine of the 21st century, which took place in Somalia in 2011, the death toll could have been reduced if the global community had responded sooner. An estimated 250,000 people died in this famine, about 130,000 of whom were children under 5. FEWS NET had been warning of an approaching famine for eight months before international aid flights began. On the day in July 2011 when famine was declared, about half of the victims had already died

Over the past 40 years, FEWS NET has become increasingly sophisticated in its ability to use the analysis of data from numerous sources to project when and where severe hunger crises would emerge. FEWS NET has a strong track record of providing accurate information on the most likely scenarios up to six months in advance. This analytical work is vital to enabling communities, national governments, and humanitarian officials to be as prepared as possible. 

Large-scale humanitarian assistance programs, in particular, take time to put in place. In some cases, there are a million people, 2 million people, or even more who have been displaced from their land and therefore can no longer grow food for themselves and their families. Common terms such as refugee camps or settlements for displaced people are sometimes misnomers. The places where people take refuge from conflict or climate impacts are often more like small cities. They need many of the public services of cities as well, from clean water and sanitation systems to medical clinics and schools. Securing the financial resources needed, finding sources of needed supplies, and positioning necessities where impacted communities can access them is a time-consuming process. Once planning is underway, local staff need time to begin to build relationships with community leaders. Providers of emergency assistance should work with women, people from minority groups, unaccompanied children, and other key groups whose representation is important—whether they are considered community leaders or not. 

People with experience working in-country express dismay over losing access to FEWS NET, as Ambassador Natsios above has. Evan Thomas, a professor of environmental engineering at the University of Colorado, Boulder, said that closing down FEWS NET is “quite petty – we’re not even spending money to host a website that has data on it, and now we’ve taken that down so that other people around the world can’t use information that could save lives,” he said.

The loss of FEWS NET “compromises our models, and our ability to be able to provide accurate forecasts of ground water use,” said Denis Muthike, a Kenyan scientist and assistant research professor at University of Colorado, Boulder. He said that closing down FEWS NET would affect water usage, pointing out that talking about food security means talking about water security as well. Muthike added that it would take many years to build another monitoring service that could reach the same level of analysis as FEWS NET. 

It is heartening that the world has developed tools that can provide advance warning of hunger crises and other disasters. People from earlier periods in history would surely have appreciated such information. But of course, services such as FEWS NET can only help people if they are available to all—and if donors act on their information in time.

Michele Learner is managing editor, Policy and Research Institute, with Bread for the World.

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