For years, Luis Treminio has provided guidance to farmers in El Salvador, using a U.S.-backed famine monitoring system to boost crop production and help prevent hunger.
Armed with public bulletins and regular food security alerts produced by the Famine Early Warning Systems Network (FEWS NET), Treminio would relay the critical data to farmers.
But it was funded by the United States Agency for International Development (USAID) and has been operating at sharply reduced capacity since President Donald Trump ordered a spending freeze on USAID in January.
“It’s a very important early warning system tool,” said Treminio, who heads the Salvadorian Chamber of Small and Medium Agricultural Producers, an association of about 125,000 corn, beans, sorghum and rice growers.
“If the program’s early warning alerts disappear, I think producers would have worse losses than we already do,” he said.
FEWS NET provided forecasts six to twelve months in advance, with drought and weather monitoring to help farmers plan when to plant their crops.
The FEWS NET program has shifted to a new website under the U.S. Geological Survey (USGS) but with limited information, dealing a blow to those who relied on the service from local farming associations and international aid groups to governments and policymakers. ‘LARGE GAP’
USAID cuts have significantly affected humanitarian organizations around the world that were working on life-saving programs from vital HIV health care to land demining and food aid.
Created by the U.S. government in 1985 after devastating famines in East and West Africa, FEWS NET reports have been a key resource for organizations deciding where and how to deploy humanitarian relief.
On January 27, Chemonics International, which manages FEWS NET, received a stop-work order from USAID. Two days later, FEWS NET’s original website went dark and has been offline ever since.
According to Mike Budde, USGS FEWS NET program manager, work is underway to get the new website fully functioning, but it is likely to take some time.
“The USGS FEWS NET website is in no way a replacement or replication” of the original site, Budde told Context/the Thomson Reuters Foundation in an email.
“There is a large gap in the resources we provide” compared with the earlier website, he said.
“That said, we are in the process of coordinating across our science team to make available some of the information previously posted on that site in the interim.”
EARLY WARNING REPORTS
Across Africa, food security experts and humanitarian workers said FEWS NET has been indispensable to humanitarian and development work – providing data-driven insights into food security, climate impacts and emerging crises.
Its regular assessments and early warning reports enabled aid workers to anticipate and respond to acute food insecurity, especially in regions in East and West Africa affected by drought, conflict and economic shocks, they said.
For example, during periods of severe drought or conflict, FEWS NET’s monthly and seasonal forecasts integrating climate data, crop conditions and market analysis helped identify vulnerable communities and prioritize interventions.
This ensured that aid reached those most at risk before situations escalated into full-blown emergencies.
“FEWS NET’s comprehensive approach … has supported ActionAid Ethiopia and partners in designing holistic responses to complex crises,” said Tinebeb Berhane, ActionAid Country Director in Ethiopia.
“The network’s evidence-based recommendations are widely used not only by NGOs but also by government bodies and international agencies for coordinated humanitarian planning and policy action.”
By leveraging FEWS NET’s robust early warning systems and localized data, Berhane said her organization strengthened its anticipatory action and contributed to effective, targeted and life-saving assistance for vulnerable populations.
Erin Lentz, associate professor at the LBJ School of Public Affairs at The University of Texas at Austin and an expert on international food security, said FEWS NET was “trying to do better early warning, how to think about these things holistically.”
“That’s hard to do and takes a lot of training, understanding of global economic factors, requires the ability to think about how these things directly impact people’s lives and livelihoods,” she said.
Early warnings and food insecurity analyses by FEWS NET were effectively used to help address a famine in Somalia in 2011 and contributed to averting another famine there in 2017, according to Lentz.
“Part of the problem is that one of the most valuable parts of early warning is trend analysis – are things getting worse or better?” Lentz said.
“It’s hard to retrospectively rebuild data,” she said.
“Maybe that could be taken over by another organization, but it’s not clear yet who that is or who has the skills and infrastructure to do that.”