From Famine Early Warning Systems Network<\/figcaption><\/div>\n<\/div>\n US Secretary of State Macro Rubio, now the acting administrator of USAID, has repeatedly said he has issued a blanket waiver for lifesaving programs, including food and medical aid. <\/p>\n
\u201cBut very soon, if the food assistance does continue to flow, but FEWS NET is not there, then there isn\u2019t any good mechanism, at least no internal mechanism within the US, to help determine where that assistance is most needed.\u201d <\/p>\n
\u201cIt serves the US government, but it also serves the rest of the humanitarian community too. So, its absence will be felt pretty much right away,\u201d said Maxwell, a professor of food security at Tufts University and a member of the Famine Review Committee for the Integrated Food Security Phase Classification (IPC) system. <\/p>\n
The IPC, another mechanism to monitor food insecurity, is a global coalition backed by UN agencies, NGOs and multiple governments, including the United States. <\/p>\n
While the two systems\u2019 functions have become more overlapping in recent years to some degree, a key difference is that the IPC analysis for specific countries is conducted on a volunteer basis, while FEWS NET has full-time staff to focus on early warning of future crises. <\/p>\n
Maxwell said that while there are other famine monitoring mechanisms, FEWS NET was the system that \u201cmost regularly updates its assessments and its forecasts.\u201d <\/p>\n
FEWS NET was created following the 1984 famine in Ethiopia, which killed an estimated 400,000 to 1 million people \u2013 and caught the world off guard. President Ronald Reagan then challenged the US government to create a system to provide early warning and inform international relief efforts in an evidence-based way. <\/p>\n
The system going dark means that \u201ceven other governments that were using our [US] data to try to provide food relief to their own people can\u2019t even access this,\u201d said Evan Thomas, a professor of environmental engineering at the University of Colorado Boulder. <\/p>\n
\u201cThis is, at this point, quite petty \u2013 we\u2019re not even spending money to host a website that has data on it, and now we\u2019ve taken that down so that other people around the world can\u2019t use information that can save lives,\u201d Thomas said. <\/p>\n
The team at the University of Colorado Boulder has built a model to forecast water demand in Kenya, which feeds some data into the FEWS NET project but also relies on FEWS NET data provided by other research teams. <\/p>\n
The data is layered and complex. And scientists say pulling the data hosted by the US disrupts other research and famine-prevention work conducted by universities and governments across the globe. <\/p>\n
\u201cImagine that that data is available to regions like Africa and has been utilized for years and years \u2013 decades \u2013 to help inform divisions that mitigate catastrophic impacts from weather and climate events, and you\u2019re taking that away from the region,\u201d Muthike said. He cautioned that it would take many years to build another monitoring service that could reach the same level. <\/p>\n
\u201cThat basically means that we might be back to the era where people used to die because of famine, or because of serious floods,\u201d Muthike added. <\/p>\n<\/p>\n
This post appeared first on cnn.com<\/div>\n
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A vital, US-run monitoring system focused on spotting food crises before they turn into famines has gone dark after the Trump administration slashed foreign aid. The Famine Early Warning Systems Network (FEWS NET) monitors drought, crop production, food prices and other indicators in order to forecast food insecurity in more than 30 countries. Funded by <\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":14054,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[23],"tags":[],"class_list":{"0":"post-14053","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-world-news"},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/digitaltradecenter.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/14053","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/digitaltradecenter.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/digitaltradecenter.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/digitaltradecenter.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/digitaltradecenter.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=14053"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/digitaltradecenter.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/14053\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/digitaltradecenter.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/14054"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/digitaltradecenter.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=14053"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/digitaltradecenter.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=14053"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/digitaltradecenter.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=14053"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}