Guinea-Bissau is a small country in West Africa. Complex patterns can be seen in the shallow waters along its coastline, where silt carried by the Geba and other rivers washes out into the Atlantic Ocean. U.S. aid agency’s international network uses satellites to spot crop trends
By Cheryl Pellerin
Since 1985, when scientists first used satellites to produce continental-scale images of vegetation and crops across Africa, the U.S. Agency for International Development (USAID) has funded an effort that warns nations and regions months in advance of serious impending food shortages.
USAID established the famine early warning system (FEWS) to help prevent or respond to famine conditions in sub-Saharan Africa by giving decision makers specific information about drought conditions or dwindling crop yields based on satellite remote-sensing data.
Satellite sensors acquire images of the Earth and transmit the data to ground receiving stations worldwide. Once the raw images are processed, analysts can document changing environmental conditions like pollution, global climate change, natural resource distribution and urban growth.
In this effort, USAID partners with NASA, the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA), the U.S. Geological Survey (USGS) and the U.S. Department of Agriculture in the United States, and collaborates with international, regional and national partners. Chemonics International, a global development firm, implements the program for USAID.
In 2000, the FEWS Network (FEWS NET) was formed to establish more effective, sustainable, African-led food security and partnerships to reduce the vulnerability of at-risk groups to famine and floods.
“At the beginning, it was primarily remote sensing,” Gary Eilerts, USAID program manager for FEWS NET, told America.gov. “It was pretty much looking at rainfall and vegetation and trying to say what we thought was happening in terms of food security.”
IMAGERY AND MARKETS
Today, he said, the program has 23 offices around the world where analysts combine maps, data and imagery with knowledge of local markets and trade in each country, and information about local livelihoods, to determine what food the market can buy locally, what it can bring in and what people can afford.
“Food security is a very complex phenomenon,” geographer Molly Brown, who works for the Biospherics Sciences Branch at NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center in Maryland, told America.gov. “Just because you have green stuff on the ground doesn’t mean you’re producing anything in the way of food.”
USAID spent $14.9 million on FEWS NET activities in 2007, funding operations in 17 African nations; regional offices in Burkina Faso, Kenya and South Africa; and country offices in Afghanistan, Haiti and Guatemala.
In the field offices, analysts study satellite imagery, local livelihoods, food security and vulnerability, markets and trade, early warning systems and agricultural economics. They also plan contingencies for and responses to food issues.
The USGS employs regional scientists for Central America, East Africa, West Africa and Southern Africa who support FEWS NET activities and strengthen the technical capacity of regional and national institutions.
FEWS NET gets its warnings out through a mix of products that are printed and posted online, Charles Chopak, Chemonics’s chief of party for FEWS NET activities, told America.gov.
These include monthly food-security updates for the 23 countries and three regional offices that are targeted to technical readers in ministries of agriculture, finance and social welfare. Regular food-security outlooks -- maps updated semi-annually -- show projected food insecurity for a country.
“When a situation is emerging or evolving,” Chopak said, “we put out a one-page food-security alert that describes what’s causing the issue and what the impact will be on food security.”
In a typical year, FEWS NET analysts might be able to give warnings five months to six months in advance of a food problem. In a bad year, they might be able to give a one- to two-month warning.
Anyone can sign up for e-mail alerts on the FEWS NET Web site. Audiences for the warnings include local governments, U.N. agencies in FEWS NET countries, USAID missions and embassies, local and international nongovernmental organizations and food-security consultants.
FOOD CRISIS
The average price of rice worldwide has more than tripled since early 2006 and wheat, corn and soybean prices have more than doubled, triggering food riots and threatening to plunge more than 100 million people into deeper hunger and poverty. The causes of the crisis vary, but the result in many places is famine. (See “Multiple Factors Drive Up Global Food Prices.”)
The evolving and increasingly advanced work of FEWS NET becomes even more critical during such a crisis, Eilerts said.
“I spend about 80 percent of my time now dealing with that crisis,” he added. “It’s much more important to know what [food] is [available in countries] and what is not. And it’s much more important to be able to follow the changes over time because this problem will be with us for several more years, if not 10 more years.”
“We’re developing a series of products specifically to respond to people at various [technical] levels who want to monitor and take action on rising prices,” Chopak said.
One product will compare the main staple food of the poor in each country with a likely substitute and try to understand the relative price changes of each. Another product will examine a series of price changes in a region and explain the food-security effect of the change.
FEWS NET is adding to its monthly reports in each country an urban assessment and vulnerability section that discusses food-security issues in urban areas, which may be more vulnerable to food shortages than agricultural areas.
More information about FEWS NET is available at the USAID Web site.
For more about remote sensing systems, see. "U.S. Agencies Moving Forward in Planning Landsat 7 Successor."
3 comments:
In the Asian, African and Latin American countries, well over 500 million people are living in what the World Bank has called "absolute poverty"
Every year 15 million children die of hunger
For the price of one missile, a school full of hungry children could eat lunch every day for 5 years
Throughout the 1990's more than 100 million children will die from illness and starvation. Those 100 million deaths could be prevented for the price of ten Stealth bombers, or what the world spends on its military in two days!
The World Health Organization estimates that one-third of the world is well-fed, one-third is under-fed one-third is starving- Since you've entered this site at least 200 people have died of starvation. Over 4 million will die this year.
One in twelve people worldwide is malnourished, including 160 million children under the age of 5. United Nations Food and Agriculture
The Indian subcontinent has nearly half the world's hungry people. Africa and the rest of Asia together have approximately 40%, and the remaining hungry people are found in Latin America and other parts of the world. Hunger in Global Economy
Nearly one in four people, 1.3 billion - a majority of humanity - live on less than $1 per day, while the world's 358 billionaires have assets exceeding the combined annual incomes of countries with 45 percent of the world's people. UNICEF
3 billion people in the world today struggle to survive on US$2/day.
In 1994 the Urban Institute in Washington DC estimated that one out of 6 elderly people in the U.S. has an inadequate diet.
In the U.S. hunger and race are related. In 1991 46% of African-American children were chronically hungry, and 40% of Latino children were chronically hungry compared to 16% of white children.
The infant mortality rate is closely linked to inadequate nutrition among pregnant women. The U.S. ranks 23rd among industrial nations in infant mortality. African-American infants die at nearly twice the rate of white infants.
One out of every eight children under the age of twelve in the U.S. goes to bed hungry every night.
Half of all children under five years of age in South Asia and one third of those in sub-Saharan Africa are malnourished.
In 1997 alone, the lives of at least 300,000 young children were saved by vitamin A supplementation programmes in developing countries.
Malnutrition is implicated in more than half of all child deaths worldwide - a proportion unmatched by any infectious disease since the Black Death
About 183 million children weigh less than they should for their age
To satisfy the world's sanitation and food requirements would cost only US$13 billion- what the people of the United States and the European Union spend on perfume each year.
The assets of the world's three richest men are more than the combined GNP of all the least developed countries on the planet.
Every 3.6 seconds someone dies of hunger
It is estimated that some 800 million people in the world suffer from hunger and malnutrition, about 100 times as many as those who actually die from it each year.
That's all very well, but the problem with Africa is that no matter how much assistance anybody would want to send them, it hardly gets to the people that really need it because of all the corruption there. Unfortunately they were better off as colonies, because as far as governing themselves they're sure making a mess of it.
In fact, I just read that on June 6humanitarian aid intended for hungry Zimbabwean children was looted by military and police forces and distributed to government party members. How can you even make a dent like that?
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