Tag: FEWS

Famine Early Warning System Restarted

Correction & Update:  Hunger Notes reported on March 19 about the cancellation of the important, 40-year-old Famine Early Warning System program, created and funded by USAID.  While true at the time, FEWS NET has been re-established. You can access it here.

The May 2025 prediction report is available here and  reports that “Conflict remains the most severe and widespread driver, particularly in settings with protracted violence or rising geopolitical tensions in East Africa, the Middle East, the Sahel, Central Africa, and Haiti. The  intersection of insecurity, inflation, and limited humanitarian access presents critical concerns across the most affected regions…the residual effects of prior droughts and floods are expected to contribute to food insecurity in parts of southern Africa, eastern Africa, and Afghanistan. Additionally, available weather forecasts suggest rainfall patterns in Sudan, South Sudan, and West Africa may mirror those of 2024, bringing flooding to riverine, wetland, and low-lying areas and dry conditions in the Gulf of Guinea. If this materializes, the resultant loss of cereal crops, cash crops, and livestock will be most acute in areas already impacted by concurrent conflict and economic shocks.”

 

– S Hansch, WHES

Why the Destruction of USAID Increases Hunger and Harms America

March 21, 2025

The United States Agency for International Development (USAID), the agency created by Congress in 1961 to lead America’s development and humanitarian assistance, has been decimated by President Trump’s January 21 Executive Order freezing U.S. foreign assistance.

Why should Americans care? For several reasons. First, USAID, until it was decimated, was the world’s largest provider of food aid, nutritional, health, and humanitarian assistance, saving millions of lives of women and children around the world. While many Americans believe that foreign aid takes a large share of federal spending, in fact this assistance accounts for less than 1% of government spending.

Cancellation of this aid has direct and immediate impact on vulnerable people in low- and middle-income countries. Nicholas Enrich, the acting assistant administrator for global health at USAID, who was placed on administrative leave on March 2 for documenting the failure of the Trump administration to follow through on its pledge to allow waivers for lifesaving foreign aid, has written that the consequences of halting $7.7 billion in funding for lifesaving global health programs will lead to the following each year:

  • 5–17.9 million cases of malaria, with an additional 71,000–166,000 deaths;
  • a 28-32% increase in tuberculosis globally;
  • an additional 200,000 paralytic polio cases;
  • more than 28,000 cases of Ebola, Marburg, or related diseases;
  • 17 million pregnant women without access to life-saving services when faced with delivery complications;
  • 11 million newborns not receiving critical postnatal care;
  • 1 million children not treated for severe acute malnutrition.

“USAID’s failure to implement lifesaving humanitarian assistance under the waiver is the result of political leadership at USAID, the Department of State, and DOGE, who have created and continue to create intentional and/or unintentional obstacles that have wholly prevented implementation,” wrote Enrich on Feb. 28. “This will no doubt result in preventable death, destabilization, and threats to national security on a massive scale.”

Second, the decimation of USAID hurts American businesses, faith-based organizations, and farmers. USAID had a well-established strategy to prioritize contracts for American small businesses like Rhode Island-based Edesia which manufacturers a lifesaving paste for severely malnourished babies. Cancellation of Edesia’s contract not only harmed this business of 150 employees but also the farmers across 25 states, the U.S. ocean liners Edesia paid to ship hundreds of metric tons of its Plumpy’Nut therapeutic paste, and finally, to the international organizations that distributed it to children staving off death.

Third, this assistance, proudly branded by USAID as “From the American People”, created good will towards the United States and its citizens. It also contributed to America’s and global health security by fighting infectious diseases and strengthening local capacity to detect and fight scourges like Ebola, Mpox, and Avian flu which continue to be threats to the United States. Wholesale cancellation of support for infectious disease and research on how to prevent and mitigate pandemics makes Americans less safe and more vulnerable.

Presidential Advisor Elon Musk bragged on X on February 3 that “We spent the weekend feeding USAID into the wood chipper. Could have gone to some great parties. Did that instead.” Under the direction of Musk’s Department of Government Efficiency, USAID’s headquarters in Washington, DC was closed, over 4,000 USAID staff terminated, and another 4,765 direct hires placed on administrative leave.

By early February, USAID contractors and implementing partners, including those providing humanitarian assistance and emergency food relief like Catholic Relief Services and Lutheran World Relief, began receiving stop-work orders. Some of these contractors and implementing partners then received communication that the stop-work orders were lifted, but then in many cases were contacted again to say the stop-work orders were still in effect.

Effectively gutting the USAID workforce means that actions to issue waivers for lifesaving programs, as the Trump Administration claimed it was doing, or to support the continuance of “approved” programs, are not happening. USAID’s payment system is not accessible. As a result, most contractors and implementing partners have not been paid for work they did before the freeze, and many have been forced to lay off and furlough staff or even cease operations.

While U.S. Secretary of State Marco Rubio, now the acting administrator of USAID, has repeatedly said he has issued a blanket waiver for lifesaving programs, including food and medical aid, no staff at implementing partners or USAID means promises of such waivers are cruel hoaxes. In early March, Rubio announced that 5,200 USAID programs had been terminated and that about 1000 USAID programs would be continued but administered by the State Department.

In addition to stopping the delivery of food and humanitarian assistance, the Trump Administration also ended the USAID-funded Famine Early Warning Systems Network (FEWS NET) which monitored drought, crop production, food prices, and other indicators in order to forecast food insecurity in more than 30 countries. FEWS NET was created following the 1984 famine in Ethiopia, which killed an estimated 400,000 to 1 million people – and caught the world off guard. President Ronald Reagan then challenged USAID to create a system to provide early warning and inform international relief efforts in an evidence-based way. Managed by contractor Chemonics International, FEWS NET employed researchers in the United States and around the world to provide eight-month projections of where food crises will likely emerge. Now, its work to prevent hunger in Sudan, South Sudan, Somalia, Yemen, Ethiopia, Afghanistan, and many other countries has been stopped. Amid the aid freeze, FEWS NET has no funding to pay staff in Washington or those working on the ground. The wealth of data that underpinned global analysis of food security – used by researchers around the world and paid for by the American people – has been pulled offline.

Aside from the immediate damage to health and health security that the decimation of USAID poses, the assault on USAID has also removed access to the world’s largest public repository of development assistance documentation, the USAID Development Experience Clearinghouse. A public good paid for by American taxpayers, the Clearinghouse and its thousands of resources are now unavailable. It is clear from the draconian cuts to USAID programs and staff that it is not a priority for the Trump Administration to make development knowledge and information available.

In Memoriam: The US Famine Early Warning System, Known as FEWS, as well as SERVIR

The program which many experts considered to be the most effective at stopping famines and starvation and arguably the single most valuable aid program of all time, has ended its 40 year run of success, as the White House shut it down, alongside hundreds of other global initiatives, without review, discussion or debate.  The “Famine Early Warning System” aka “FEWS” was created to address the longstanding problem that U.S. food aid, which takes months to plan, procure and ship across oceans, kept arriving too late to save lives where there was famine.

FEWS has prevented the deaths of an estimated 10 million children from famine during its tenure.  FEWS played an important role in the decline in famine deaths seen in the last century.

The United States Agency for International Development (USAID) created FEWS following the late famine relief efforts of the mid 1980s when famine hit Ethiopia, Sudan and the Sahel.  In those famines, US food aid saved many lives, but could have saved more, and prevented mass forced migration (the uprooting of refugees) if food aid had reached those in need at earlier stages of crisis.  The President of Tufts University (in Massachusetts), Dr. Jean Mayer, a nutritionist, proposed a new famine early warning initiative to the head of USAID at the time, and the new program was born.  In the decades since, US food aid became dramatically more effective at addressing emergency food needs in a timely way, in the process saving millions of lives.

From its inception, FEWS cleverly combined data from a range of different sources about local crop production in countries from Somalia to Mali, from Afghanistan to Haiti.  FEWS obtained and compared data from satellite imagery of fields under cultivation, ground visitations, rainfall, local retail prices, surveys of malnutrition, and distress sales by households (an early indicator of intention to migrate).  Its methods elegantly blended insights from markets, biology, climate, and remote sensing.  FEWS brought together contributions from other parts of the government:  including NASA, U.S. Geological Survey (USGS), NOAA, and the U.S. Department of Agriculture.  Various universities including the University of California/Santa Barbara and the University of Maryland also provided critical satellite monitoring and analysis, all under USAID management, backed by networks of field analysts and scientists.  The first American group leading FEWS was Tulane University School of Tropical Medicine.

Graduate courses in Geographic Information Systems (GIS) taught about FEWS as a case study of a successful application of layering information in multi-colored maps to target food aid where it was needed most.  Courses in schools of public health taught about FEWS as well.  Humanitarian aid became a science.

USAID renamed the program “FEWS NET” and funded it to avoid appearance of conflict of interest to inflate food needs through funding appeals.  The cost of FEWS NET has been a small fraction of the value of the humanitarian food aid that USAID distributes. As FEWS matured and became a global network, FEWS NET, it provided ongoing, real-time reporting about a several dozen countries spanning continents and became a mainstay of USAID, being renewed continuously.  FEWS provided guidance not only to US food aid, but food from other donor countries including Canada, Japan, Europe and Australia.  To emphasize this collaboration with other contributing nations, in 2000, the initiative was renamed to Famine Early Warning Systems Network (FEWS NET) to emphasize the importance of collaboration with international and local information systems.

FEWS NET integrated varied data to build the most-likely scenarios to project food insecurity conditions in designated countries four and eight months in advance, indicating where timely humanitarian food aid might save lives and livelihoods.  FEWS NET’s analysis have answered the who, what, where, when and why. FEWS NET also reviews livestock conditions, markets and herder mobility (and fisheries, where important), along with crop conditions.  In recent decades, conflict became the biggest driver of food insecurity due to broken market links, shrinking livelihood options, death or injury of main breadwinners, and population displacement, leading to aid dependence.

No other public source has provided this kind of independent and globally consistent food insecurity intelligence.  FEWS NET briefings to all branches of the US Government, UN and NGO community are well respected and eagerly sought.  FEWS NET also reviewed livestock conditions, markets and herder mobility (and fisheries, where important), along with crop conditions.  In recent decades, conflict became the biggest driver of food insecurity due to broken market links, shrinking livelihood options, death or injury of main breadwinners, and population displacement, leading to aid dependence.

Famines will continue to occur, but prevention and early mitigation and response will be hampered now in the absence of FEWS.

In addition to the termination of FEWS, the USG also terminated other early warning projects, such as SERVIR.  The SERVIR program was a joint initiative of NASA and USAID that leveraged satellite-based Earth observation data to support climate resilience, disaster preparedness, and prevention in poorer countries. Established in 2005, SERVIR’s mission is to “connect space to village,” making NASA’s Earth data accessible for locally-driven environmental and development solutions. SERVIR tracked food security, water resources, weather, land use, and natural hazards.  SERVIR partnered with regional organizations in Amazonia, Eastern and Southern Africa, Hindu Kush Himalaya, Mekong, West Africa, and Central America.

Other sources about the demise of FEWS:   New Humanitarian about Data Streams;  and National Public Radio’s piece.

About Servir, see:     https://nasawatch.com/trumpspace/usaid-erasure-impact-nasa-halts-servir-solicitations/ https://ntrs.nasa.gov/api/citations/20210022715/downloads/Anderson2021_Getting-ahead-of-disaster-impacts-EO-CB_20211015.pdf

Book Classic: Famine, Conflict and Response by Fred Cuny

Book Classic:  Famine, Conflict and Response:  a Basic Guide

By Fred Cuny, with Rick Hill      (West Hartford, CN:  Kumarian Press       1999)

This basic, extremely readable text about famine prevention and relief remains a preferred textbook decades after first written by Fred Cuny, and published after he was killed along with his team near Chechnya.  Compiled posthumously by Fred’s colleagues Rick Hill and Pat Reed, the text style is not academic, but practical, reflecting Fred’s own frontline problem solving in a wide range of emergencies.

Chapter one addresses the causes of famine, including war, drought, disruptions to markets, failure to plant, collapse in purchasing power and environmental degradation.  This is followed by an examination of the consequences of famine, including measles, diarrhea, the separation of family members, and challenges to social bonds.  In chapter three, Cuny puts forward the notion famines spread geographically, how famine ‘belts’ shift.  Chapter four explores the economy of rural subsistence communities and herding pastoralists.  He observes how famine coping strategies, such as eating seed stocks, prolong the famine by decreasing the next year’s harvest.

Chapter five shifts to aid agency response, namely early warning, including the USAID Famine Early Warning System (FEWS) which watches for indicators of famine;  increases in distress sales, livestock deaths, crop failure, poor rainfall, low food reserves, and then – at a late stage – increases in the rate of child malnutrition.  Fred pointed out the value of “food demand models” that “attempt to find out whether people have reasonable access to that food..  Access is measured by the market price and whether people have the money to buy an item or barter for it.”  Notably:  “a rapid increase in food prices or a drop in family income may indicate the onset of famine.”

The book then has several chapters of “counter-famine” interventions, including food, cash, “market interventions” including loans, market sales, food-for-work, price supports for livestock, barter, grain-for animal exchanges, subsidies, price controls, and income-generating projects that improve agricultural systems.  Page 76 presents a novel and brilliant diagram matching stages of famine (hoarding, migration, starvation, etc.) against preferred interventions (monetization, food-for-work, price support, intensive feeding, etc.)  Fred encourages counter-famine operations “aimed at keeping the local market system from collapsing, preventing people from having to sell their assets, stopping migration and maintaining the family.”

Decades ahead of his time, Cuny outlined the use of vouchers or coupons, to be redeemed with identified food vendors set up for each community.  He also recognized the counter-famine dynamics of tapping local merchants and food supplies:  “Once merchants release food they are hoarding, others will also start to sell… helping to reactive the normal market system.”

The book explains food rations and the logistics of moving and storing food to camps.  His explanation of the use of aircraft is short but clear.  The book concludes with chapters about effective aid monitoring and cross-border operations which are frequently necessary for reaching conflict zones.  The book concludes with discussion of helping populations along border “enclaves” and their long-term shift to rehabilitation and return.

In the volume’s introduction former OXFAM, CEO John Hammock, and former USAID administrator, Andrew Natsios, explain that Fred’s “powers of observation and analysis were his greatest strengths, allowing him to aggregate disparate and seemingly unrelated data into a coherent explanation of what was happening and then design a comprehensive strategy to address the crisis.” Then, “Whenever Fred traveled to a food emergency, he would first stop at the local market to review prices for price and livestock and to talk with merchants about inflationary pressures, the volume of commodity turnover in the market, the sources of commodity supply, and to which local ethnic or political groups the merchants were allied.  And then he would simply stand and observe:  who was buying, what they were buying, and what they were using for currency.  By the end of the first day, he would understand much of the economy of famine in the region.”

They also summarize key themes that ran through Fred’s analyses:

  •  The context of the emergency is crucial;
  •   Traditional responses by international agencies can cause more harm than good;
  •   International aid is a drop in the bucket compared with local aid;
  •   The key to success in relief aid is involving local people directly;
  •   Relief and development are intricately linked;
  •   Relief aid is not a logistical exercise to get goods to people – it is a process to accelerate recovery; and
  •   Relief intervention teaches us lessons; we should heed the lessons learned from the past.