Famine Early Warning Systems Network (FEWS NET)

In partnership with the U.S. Agency for International Development, the U.S. Department of Agriculture provides technical assistance to the FEWS Net activity, launched in July 2000 to follow on the work of the former Famine Early Warning System (FEWS) Project. Building on its predecessor’s work, FEWS NET’s principal objectives are to provide comprehensive early warning and food security assessment information, and to do this in such a way that the capabilities of national and regional partners in Africa, Asia, and the Americas are strengthened to do the same. The goal of FEWS NET is to help create sustainable information systems that facilitate and empower host countries to identify their own food security problems, and to find their own solutions to them.

FEWS NET consists of a private-sector contractor implementing country activities, and inter-agency agreements with NASA, NOAA, USGS, and USDA. The four inter-agency partners provide a wide range of technical expertise for food security assessment, and applied development of early warning and food security assessment tools and methods.

USDA’s PECAD is playing an increasingly important role as a technical partner of FEWS NET. PECAD is lending expertise and tools it uses to assess crop production in the major crop growing areas of the world, and FEWS NET is helping to test and adapt those methods for use in very food insecure and agriculturally marginal conditions.

FEWS NET and PECAD recently coordinated the efforts of leading agencies in making a remote assessment of Zimbabwe’s 2005 agricultural production, achieving an international consensus that allowed decision-makers to immediately begin discussing how to address the dimensions of the impending food security emergency in that country. In the previous year, a lack of consensus significantly delayed humanitarian response planning.

Countries: Thirty countries in the West and Southern Africa, the Horn of Africa, Afghanistan, Haiti, and Central America.