As the U.S. Agency for International Development was fed into the “wood chipper” this month, so was our ability to predict and prevent the worst effects of the next humanitarian crisis.
One of the casualties of suspending funding for USAID programs and threatening to shut the agency down has been FEWS NET, the global Famine Early Warning System, which I helped create 40 years ago and initially directed.
FEWS NET monitors 30 countries across Africa, Central America, the Caribbean and South Asia, collecting data on weather patterns, agricultural production, market prices and conflict trends in order to predict and guide responses to food crises before they escalate into full-blown famine. Known as “the gold standard of famine-warning systems,” it has allowed governments and international organizations to save millions of lives by sharpening the focus and cutting the costs of emergency aid. FEWS Net forecasting also enabled the U.S. agriculture and shipping industries to send aid where and when it was needed most, helping alleviate global food insecurity and saving even more lives.
But now, due to attacks on USAID, FEWS NET is offline. As a result, humanitarian relief organizations around the world (not just the U.S.) are flying blind, without important data to guide them on when, where and how to deploy aid.
This may be a good time to recall where the original impetus for FEWS NET came from. Was it the brainchild of tax-and-spend liberals looking for a way to waste money on a woke agenda? No — it was the Reagan administration and the National Security Council, who understood the U.S. interest in preventing famines.
In 1984, they and the country had been shocked by images of Ethiopian children dying in a famine that had gripped the Sahel countries. Reagan took a personal interest, creating a special $50 million presidential fund to allow more a flexible response to severe food emergencies and a task force to provide better forecasting of food shortages. Then congressional leaders, both Republicans and Democrats, charged USAID with developing a way to inform political decision-makers about the location and probability of potential famine events that could impact U.S. security.
At the time, I was at Tulane University working on a computerized health information system for the country of Niger. USAID contacted me, and within a few months we built a rudimentary system to monitor food security conditions across the Sahel region using early portable computers, a ham radio, and a forerunner to the Internet called Mango Net. This was the 1.0 version of the system that grew into the global FEWS NET.
As its first director, I pushed to expand the project’s scope to incorporate infectious disease and other data, so the system could also provide early warning for preventable crises like global pandemics, and to assess progress on other key issues, such as climate change adaptation, all of which could make aid more efficient.
The great irony of shutting down FEWS NET is that it goes against the Trump administration’s stated rationale of slashing bureaucracy and ceasing to waste money on ineffective programs that aren’t in U.S. interests.
I have long been a vocal critic of USAID’s overly bureaucratized management and lack of sensible monitoring and impact evaluation. Critics who complained USAID programs were often managed by inexperienced personnel stuck in their silos re-inventing the wheel aren’t wrong. I was one of them. But that’s no argument for shutting the agency down.
On the contrary, it’s an argument for working it harder and smarter — doing the monitoring and evaluation, busting the silos, increasing the efficiency, and setting performance indicators for USAID programs in terms of achieving U.S. objectives. If the goal is to make federal spending efficient and serve U.S. national interests, then FEWS NET shouldn’t be dismantled; it should be expanded.
We need a data-driven approach to deploy limited resources effectively and prevent famine and disease before they spread. Data-driven early warning systems like FEWS NET enable aid providers to head off famines by giving them time to stockpile food. For example, FEWS NET is credited with preventing famine in Ethiopia in 2016, thereby also heading off the downstream economic and security losses that famines incur. And it costs a tiny fraction of what it would cost to respond to a full-blown famine.
Responding to humanitarian crises ineffectively, with too little, too late — or failing to respond at all — is self-defeating and will hurt the U.S. It is profoundly in our interest to prevent famine and reduce food insecurity worldwide. Climate change, supply chain disruptions, pandemics and conflicts are multipliers that increasingly intensify food crises. Hunger and famine make people desperate, drive migration and often fuel terrorism.
If we want to further U.S. goals like fighting terrorism and easing growing migration pressures, while making the most efficient use of our resources, we not only need to reinstate data-driven tools like FEWS NET, we need to upgrade them. Modern monitoring systems can incorporate AI advances and new analytical thinking, and measure progress on various aspects of sustainable development.
You can’t manage what you can’t measure. By measuring and managing humanitarian crisis risk with modern data-driven tools, we can achieve the kind of efficiency the Trump administration wants and serve our national interests while helping humanity.
Dr. William E. Bertrand is the Emeritus Wisner Professor of Public Health at Tulane University, known for his work in technology-driven international development and environmental and institutional sustainability.
