From the COVID-19 pandemic to persistent conflict to desert locust outbreaks, populations around the world have faced severe challenges to food security in 2020. The number of people suffering from chronic hunger is forecast to increase from 690 million in 2019 to as many as 822 million by the end of the year. A Nov. 24 IFPRI policy seminar examined how the newly upgraded Food Security Portal (FSP), funded by the European Commission (EC), can provide critical food security-related data, information, and risk monitoring to help governments and other stakeholders increase the resilience of food systems and cope with ongoing and future food crises.
The FSP’s open access innovative tools have made it a global public good, particularly given the new challenges COVID-19 poses to food security, said Conrad Rein, EC Policy Officer and Co-Chair of the Global Donor Platform for Rural Development.
In 2010, the FSP launched its Excessive Food Price Variability Early Warning System in response to the 2007-2008 global food price crisis, said IFPRI’s Markets, Trade and Institutions Division Director Rob Vos. Food prices for many staple commodities showed extreme volatility at the time, driving market uncertainty and causing problems for both producers and consumers. Many were concerned the COVID-19 pandemic would lead to similar food price volatility; but the FSP’s volatility tool, which allows researchers to track daily price movements for several major commodities, has shown relative stability, Vos said.
The upgraded FSP includes an expanded Food Price Watch, which incorporates daily, weekly, and monthly global prices for nine major commodities, and a COVID-19 Price Monitor, which tracks local prices of six important staple foods in India, Guatemala, Rwanda, Burundi, Uganda, Tanzania, and Kenya. The FSP also aims to act as a hub for other early warning and food crisis risk monitoring tools and reports, and to provide a platform for policy dialogue and capacity development. (Read more about how the FSP continues to use data and information to advance food security research and policymaking.) Vos also outlined the FSP’s new e-learning training courses focusing on Africa (English and French).
“As the old adage says, ‘you cannot manage what you cannot measure,’” Vos said. “With the portal, we try to contribute to the management of food security with better information, analysis, and tools.”
Pandemic lockdowns threatened food security—and have also presented obstacles to data gathering, said Arif Husain, Chief Economist at the World Food Programme (WFP).
WFP officials considered themselves lucky, he said, because they had been improving and scaling up the use of new technologies like mobile phones for data collection and risk monitoring since 2012. Thus the organization was able to continue collecting critical data from almost 40 countries as the pandemic unfolded.
It’s important to collaborate with other information systems such as the FSP that provide timely data, near-real-time monitoring, and relevant policy analysis, Husain said. “I’m a fan of connecting silos,” he said. “And this portal is an amazingly good silo to which we are going to connect … It reduces duplication of information but also exponentially increases access to our information.”
Data and information are crucial for improving diets and nutrition, said Jessica Fanzo, Bloomberg Distinguished Professor of Global Food & Agricultural Policy and Ethics at Johns Hopkins University. As food systems gain more attention from policy makers, linking their transformation to improved nutrition and other goals has become increasingly important, she said. However, food systems data is often spread across multiple sources, making informed decision-making difficult. The Food Systems Dashboard, launched in June, aims to fill these gaps by mapping over 170 indicators of food systems. drivers, and outcomes, she said.
“The question is, how much are these [portals] used to aid in decision-making, especially in crisis situations?” Fanzo said. Important issues remain to be addressed by the FSP, the Food Systems Dashboard, and future information portals, including gaps in data or outdated or closed data, lack of easy-to-understand visualizations, and lack of sub-national context to make data more useful at the local level.
“The more tools, the better,” Fanzo concluded, “because it allows for decision-makers to … get a full picture.”
Ousmane Badiane, Executive Chairperson of Akademiya2063, shared progress in monitoring food security indicators from the CAADP framework, the Malabo Declaration, and the Montpelier Panels. “We are gearing all our efforts to helping African countries, all 55 of them, hold each other accountable to measure progress around an agenda they’ve committed to work on together,” Badiane said.
CAADP’s interactive tracking platform focuses on seven agriculture indicators and 40 sub-indicators. The platform updates data on a regular basis to assist member countries in monitoring their own and others’ progress. CAADP also mandates a continent-wide biennial review and offers an interactive data entry and evaluation platform and country joint sector reviews.
Monitoring systems are key to preventing food crises, said Máximo Torero, Chief Economist at the UN Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO) and one of the FSP’s original designers. Torero identified five significant improvements in data trends in recent years: In timeliness, geographic disaggregation, data and interpretation quality, response to user demand, and analysis. These trends help determine how platforms perform in providing early warning of food crises.
“We don’t have predictive power right now,” Torero said. “We can see more or less when a situation is getting worse … But for situations of food crisis, we need to combine many dimensions. It is not an easy job.”
Improving and better coordinating information-sharing among food security early warning experts is also crucial, he said, in order to disseminate food security developments to a broader audience. This will help platforms like the FSP provide better information and guidance to aid policy makers in minimizing food crisis risk and building resilience.
“We have a lot of tools that are very helpful, but I think what COVID-19 has shown us is that we need to do a lot more and we need to find ways to manage today’s enormous information flows,” Torero said.
While the EC supports a number of collaborative food crisis warning platforms, said Philippe Thomas, Head of Sector for the EC’s Food and Agricultural Systems, Crisis and Resilience group, “There is no competition between the different systems.”
Sara Gustafson is a freelance writer. This post also appears on the Food Security Portal blog.
