The world was appalled by pictures of malnourished Ethiopian children in the summer of 1985, which led to one of the largest charity concerts ever: Live Aid. In London and Philadelphia, megastars including Paul McCartney, Queen, Madonna, and Lionel Richie performed live. More than a billion people watched in live and on television as Tina Turner and Mick Jagger dazzled the crowd. The event raised well over $100 million for Africa’s famine relief efforts.
The U.S. government also responded to the hunger, so celebrities weren’t the only ones.
It established a strategy to prevent famines in the future that same year. The first famine early warning system network in history, FEWS NET, was established by the United States. It started generating thorough and timely updates on where and when famine would strike by combining data from a variety of sources, including trade dynamics, meteorological data, crop reports, and migration information.
This approach has been used by governments and humanitarian organizations worldwide to forecast and avert food shortages for many years. That abruptly stopped in January. President Trump’s stop-work orders caused the early warning system to go offline. Before Trump destroyed it, it was a part of the U.S. Agency for International Development.
The process of bringing FEWS NET back online is now underway. The humanitarian aid community has responded to this news with both excitement and prudence, as experts in food security caution that there are still concerns regarding the effectiveness of the restored system and its ability to avert famine.
The “lighthouse”
Data nerds from more than 20 nations, including Haiti and Somalia, labor for FEWS NET, which is supported by the US government and operated by contractors. They sift through data to create comprehensive forecasts of hunger hotspots, projecting future events eight months in advance and then updating those forecasts on a regular basis. In order to prevent a food crisis, this enables governments and relief organizations to modify regulations and arrange food so that it arrives at the appropriate time and location.
“We are working to collect information, analyze information, and validate this information in the field,” says Luis Ramirez, a member of the Latin America and Caribbean team for FEWS NET. He is the regional technical lead and is based in Guatemala.
FEWS NET is a lighthouse in his mind. “That lighthouse that helps to guide through that sea where the ships should go to help the people,” adds Ramirez.
Although preventing human suffering is the main objective, its efforts also help to maintain stability and stop mass migration. Additionally, according to Alex de Waal, a professor at Tufts University who specializes in famine studies and leads the school’s World Peace Foundation, FEWS NET made financial sense.
“It is far, far cheaper to prevent a disaster than it is to relieve suffering when a disaster unfolds,” according to him.
He claims that when FEWS NET helped notify the globe about a severe drought in Ethiopia in 2016, its worth became clear. Ethiopians and Americans began putting food aid in place six months prior to the destruction.
By all accounts, this early warning had an astonishing impact. “It was likely the greatest number of people in all of Africa to ever be impacted by a food crisis in Ethiopia. Not only did nobody perish, but we also avoided the migration and the poverty. According to de Waal, it was actually a model.
He believed that famine might be a thing of the past because of this kind of transformation. “For most of my career, I thought, ‘OK, I’m studying something that’s being consigned to history,'” de Waal said.
“Turn it off”
Famines, however, have persisted. And when Trump stopped most foreign funding in late January, Ramirez’s metaphorical lighthouse fell dark, but FEWS NET continued to try to prevent catastrophe.
“It was pretty much like, ‘OK, just stand up, turn it off and walk away,'” Ramirez recalled.
The operation of FEWS NET was severely hampered by the stop-work orders and aid disruptions.
“It was the first and only time that we’ve been offline,” says Tanya Boudreau, a Washington, D.C.-based employee of FEWS NET. She oversees the group responsible for combining all of the data collected globally, evaluating it, and disseminating the results.
Then, in the middle of April, FEWS NET components began to reappear. The website was operational again before the end of June. Additionally, according to Boudreau, there will be reports from every nation the agency has previously worked with as well as a global view with an eight-month forecast in October.
Requests for comment from NPR regarding the State Department’s decision to shut down and then relaunch FEWS NET were not answered. Additionally, it did not address concerns regarding the system’s future scope and finances.
However, many working in the field saw the decision to resume FEWS NET as positive. Caitlin Welsh, director of the Center for Strategic and International Studies’ Global Food and Water Security Program, says, “It signaled to me that there were people inside the U.S. government that understood the importance of this information that we were providing, not only for ourselves but for every country around the world.”
The impact of the shutdown
They’re still evaluating the effects of the multi-month outage, according to Boudreau. One thing, however, is evident, she claims: “There’s been a gap in the information that decision-makers have to plan.”
De Waal is concerned that Ethiopia may demonstrate the effects of FEWS NET once more, this time emphasizing the impact of the brief shutdown. The Integrated Food Security Phase Classification, or IPC, was a rival UN method for famine detection that was discontinued by the local government. This occurred in 2021 after the Ethiopian government accused U.N. officials of interfering in its domestic affairs and the organization issued a warning about hunger induced by human activity in Ethiopia.
Ethiopia is currently “on the brink of a major food crisis,” according to de Waal. However, we lack sufficient data and intelligence in the absence of the IPC and FEWS NET. In fact, it’s really frightening.
He contends that even in nations with operational IPC, FEWS NET remains essential. IPC depends on the host country because it is a component of the U.N. system. “And that means that if that country, let’s say Sudan or Ethiopia, wants to conceal a famine, it’s easy for them to manipulate the information available to the U.N. agencies,” according to him. He claims that many nations depend on FEWS NET’s independence because of this. That increased the significance of this year’s shutdown.
“When it was taken offline, there were reverberations around the world because so many people were relying on that information,” Welsh explains.
The lighthouse light comes back on
Ramirez was overjoyed to learn that he could reapply for his previous position. His wife was, too. She heard through his office door during his June interviews. “When they told me, ‘OK, Luis, we want to continue,’ she was like, ‘Yes! Yes! Yes!'” Ramirez recalls.
To make sure they have everything they need to get FEWS NET back up and running, Boudreau has been phoning individuals like Ramirez to see how they are doing.
FEWS NET has been able to “get back to work really, really quickly” in part because many of the staff members, some of whom have worked on the project for thirty years, have returned, she says. “Surprisingly, we lost very few people,” adds Boudreau. According to her, a new job requires roughly six months of training, so that’s crucial.
Even after the initiative was halted, several employees continued to work unofficially to monitor the hunger condition in their nation, which has further astounded Boudreau.
“One of the most heartwarming things is just how committed our staff are to this project,” she continues. “And so while there’s been a gap in reporting, there hasn’t actually been a gap in monitoring, in many cases.”
She admits that there are still many unanswered questions, such as whether FEWS NET would carry with its pre-Trump ambitions to expand to the more than 20 nations where the system is already operational.
Tufts University’s De Waal said he has a lot of questions as well.
“Is the information still going to be gathered with the same rigor and speed?” he asks. “And will you take action if you have the information?
Given that the United States and several European nations have drastically reduced their humanitarian help, he fears that a strong response may be absent.
The impact of that other historic famine event in 1985, Live Aid, also reflects this altered mindset. Rock icon Bob Geldof, who organized that historic event, has been interviewed for the concert’s 40th anniversary. Journalist Bill Weir talked with Geldof on CNN about how “cool” it was in 1985 to show support for children who were starving halfway around the world and “how far we seem from that today.” In a New York Times interview, Geldof also remarked, “We’re in a radically different world now.”
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