CHAPTER TWO

Food Crisis Risk Monitoring

Early Warning for Early Action

Rob Vos, Arif Husain, Friederike Greb, Peter Läderach, and Brendan Rice

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Early warning systems play a vital role in identifying likely crises and speeding responses, but could be made more effective with greater integration

KEY MESSAGES

Early-warning, early-action systems provide alerts of potential food crises — identified as sudden and substantial increases in acute food insecurity — as well as guidance to policymakers and international development agencies about needs for humanitarian action.
Use of different methodologies and varying coverage of vulnerable populations mean different early warning systems for acute food insecurity can yield dissimilar estimates of the severity of food crises.
Local food security monitoring systems are poorly connected to systems that track global food and agriculture market trends. Monitoring of acute food insecurity and chronic food insecurity are poorly integrated at the country level. This leads to differing interpretations of the nature and magnitude of food crises.
Existing systems pay insufficient attention to structural vulnerabilities that determine how different shocks, including global price shocks, affect food insecurity in particular contexts and compound other causes of acute food insecurity, such as poverty, conflict, and climate change.
Famines are the catastrophic expression of severe food crises. Today’s famine-like contexts are mostly driven by conflict. Conflict typically impedes the data collection required by existing protocols for declaring famine, which can delay humanitarian action, at the expense of a preventable human toll.

To increase the effectiveness of early warning systems, it is important to:

Expand the country coverage and frequency of consensus-based acute food security analysis.
Revise the protocol for declaration of a famine to ensure it is operational in conflict-affected locations.
Better integrate the various types of food crisis early warning systems through much stronger collaborative efforts across responsible international organizations, with support from the research community and in consultation with policymakers, development agencies, and local actors.
Improve monitoring of risk factors and structural causes of crises to support the development of real-time early warning systems that are able to anticipate and potentially help prevent food crises through timely and well-targeted responses.
Strengthen analysis of factors driving crises in particular places — including global supply and price shocks, how these are transmitted to local contexts, what structural vulnerabilities increase or mitigate their impact, and how they affect acute and chronic food insecurity — to inform long-term responses that build resilience and reduce the risk of food crises.