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 USAID and managed by contractor Chemonics International, the project employs researchers in the United States and across the globe to provide eight-month projections of where food crises will emerge.
Now, its work to prevent hunger in Sudan, South Sudan, Somalia, Yemen, Ethiopia, Afghanistan and many other nations has been stopped amid the Trump administration’s effort to dismantle the US Agency for International Development (USAID).
“These are the most acutely food insecure countries around the globe,” said Tanya Boudreau, the former manager of the project.
Amid the aid freeze, FEWS NET has no funding to pay staff in Washington or those working on the ground. The website is down. And its treasure trove of data that underpinned global analysis on food security – used by researchers around the world – has been pulled offline.
FEWS NET is considered the gold-standard in the sector, and it publishes more frequent updates than other global monitoring efforts. Those frequent reports and projections are key, experts say, because food crises evolve over time, meaning early interventions save lives and save money.
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.
“But very soon, if the food assistance does continue to flow, but FEWS NET is not there, then there isn’t any good mechanism, at least no internal mechanism within the US, to help determine where that assistance is most needed.”
“It 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,” 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.
The IPC, another mechanism to monitor food insecurity, is a global coalition backed by UN agencies, NGOs and multiple governments, including the United States.
While the two systems’ 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.
Maxwell said that while there are other famine monitoring mechanisms, FEWS NET was the system that “most regularly updates its assessments and its forecasts.”
‘Decades’ of data taken offline
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 the US government to create a system to provide early warning and inform international relief efforts in an evidence-based way.
The system going dark means that “even other governments that were using our [US] data to try to provide food relief to their own people can’t even access this,” said Evan Thomas, a professor of environmental engineering at the University of Colorado Boulder.
“This is, at this point, 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 can save lives,” Thomas said.
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.
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.
“Imagine that that data is available to regions like Africa and has been utilized for years and years – decades – to help inform divisions that mitigate catastrophic impacts from weather and climate events, and you’re taking that away from the region,” Muthike said. He cautioned that it would take many years to build another monitoring service that could reach the same level.
“That basically means that we might be back to the era where people used to die because of famine, or because of serious floods,” Muthike added.