المنتدى العالمي المعني بالأمن الغذائي والتغذية

Near-real-time monitoring of food crisis risk factors for improved early warning early action

In the recent decades several approaches have been employed in early warning systems with the aim of improving the quality of information that reach the tables of policy makers. The continuing thrives toward more advances real time early warning systems is a manifestation that policy designed to tackle food security crisis are far from being satisfactory. This does not mean those policies do not work, but rather they lead to designing interventions that do not perpendicularly address the crisis or influence implementation of a good intervention towards poor results. In a crisis event the time period between occurrence of the crisis and interference intervention to absorb its effects to livelihood is crucial. Even a good intervention that is implemented weeks after the crisis may seem as no intervention at all. Thus real time early warning system is an important input to effective policy decision that will lead to timed intervention.

Designing a quality real time early warning system should focus first on integrating a number of sub systems that provide information which when analyzed give the meaning we need to fully understand the crisis. Unfortunately, food insecurity crisis can emanate from an array of origins from failure of a crop due to drought, floods, plant diseases, post harvest losses, political instability, trade difficulties and health to decision making in the household like food preparation and distribution among family members. Thus a good system has to combine data from all these sources and allow selection of the best intervention option. For preventative policy response such a system should be able to provide early signs that a crisis is coming. Early signs can be for example a spike in under five malnutrition, signs of a pest/disease outbreak etc. Fortunately, these subsystems are available but work independently in different departments in most countries.

Preparedness to emergency food aids, disease outbreaks, evacuations are policy responses that have shown success when guided by weather monitoring tools. In many countries there are national disaster committees that constantly receive weather updates and interpret into policy response that avert food crisis and save lives.

Local food prices are one way to get a temperature check of local market conditions, but high frequency local market price data is not widely available because of geographical discrepancies and communication endowments. In real time monitoring this gap is likely to widen if internet use will not be promoted up to the local level. Fortunately internet use need less effort to promote as it has been accepted easily to its multiple use. Policy concern is needed to address literacy in local areas as this can limit sharing of market information via internet.

Advances in early warning technologies and data must be matched by developing capacity within institutions at the country and regional level to transform relevant data into preventative actions. Promoting use of internet, developing easy to use electronic monitoring platforms, institutional capacity building and making efforts to link several platforms into a common backbone is needed in order to scale up the use of real-time monitoring in early warning early action systems by regional organizations, national governments, and other country level institutions. This requires government willingness to invest in building technical capacity of the people to develop and run such systems effectively.

As noted earlier, an effective real time monitoring system is the one that incorporate outputs from several other subsystems and allow interpretation of data that will give logic to a phenomena. To have such a system collaboration of organizations with interest in early warning is important to remove flaws that are inherent in one system.

1. How should real-time monitoring be designed and utilized to strengthen existing early warning systems and support preventative policy responses to food crisis risk.

• Digital solutions will provide valuable globally aggregated and accurate realtime data about food production.  Digital solutions are on their way to provide farmers with:
  • Agronomic recommendations
  • (micro)finance services
  • (micro)agri-insurance services

These services can provide tremendous improvement in terms of productivity and resiliency for the food production system. In order to work properly, such solutions require real time data to be shared by farmers about crops, productions…  This is key.

These data can feed big data & analytic solutions to aggregate information and having both a near real time feedback of harvests along with expected production (with some more sophisticated analytics).

• Internet of Things and satellite along with Cloud solutions will allow climate prediction to anticipate food shortage. IoT (Internet of Things) + BigData/Analytics can integrate existing satellite data with local AWS (Automatic Weather Stations) to estimate the impact of weather conditions on global & local farming area.

New generation smart sensors for agriculture will be simpler and cheaper enabling IoT at global scale. Farmers will benefit to invest few dollars to have real-time information about the soil & air humidity to fine tune irrigation and/or taking any agronomic choices (from seeding/harvest time to treatments). These additional data can be shared on anonymous base with larger data pools (in exchange of services such as software tool use providing agronomic recommendations, pricing information, etc.) further increasing the quantity and quality of climate data. Predictions about food production will not only be more and more accurate, but also more and more automatic.

Government incentives Local governments should support adoptions of such tools for instance incentivizing (*) innovative startups and large corporations to cooperate to launch innovative solutions. (*) policies, subsidies, credits, VC, tax holidays

Data privacy policies to incentive data exchange Key would be to define national and international simple but fair policies about data privacy to motivate data exchange.

Data to flow from “local data lake to global data ocean” Equivalently important would be having some sort of pragmatical protocol and format for data exchange among technologies and software to enable data to flow from local to global.

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2. What are examples of successful policy responses at country level that have been guided by existing monitoring tools?

Some platform to aggregate data at national and global level are already available. They should ideally further develop integrating with other local and global solutions (gov and business oriented). Following some examples:

INDIA: http://agriexchange.apeda.gov.in/

CGIAR: https://bigdata.cgiar.org/shared-services/

FAO: http://api.data.fao.org/

GODAN: https://www.godan.info/pages/about-open-data

AGRIROUTER: https://my-agrirouter.com/en/

IBM & YARA: (The Open Farm & Field Data Exchange) https://newsroom.ibm.com/2020-01-23-Yara-and-IBM-launch-an-open-collaboration-for-farm-and-field-data-to-advance-sustainable-food-production

api-agro: https://api-agro.eu/en/the-platform/

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3. Local food prices are one way to get a temperature check of local market conditions, but high frequency local market price data is not widely available. Where are the gaps such as this one in real-time monitoring and how can these be addressed both in a research and policy context?

Research and policies should support the development of open digital platforms and standard for data exchanges. These frameworks require financial resources and international agreements, while are necessary to boost the development of INTEROPERABLE digital solutions to provide market services to farmers and buyers with an expected relevant increase of efficiency in the supply chain, market pricing and food waste reduction.

Once such solutions will be widely used and based on common framework for data exchange, it would be easy to AGGREGATE LOCAL DATA AT GLOBAL LEVEL. Cloud analytics software could be developed to receive anonymized data flows from local & global digital platforms allowing to have a real time global assessment of prices and food availability.

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4. Advances in early warning technologies and data must be matched by developing capacity within institutions at the country and regional level to transform relevant data into preventative actions. What is needed to initiate and scale up the use of real-time monitoring in early warning early action systems by regional organizations, national governments, and other country level institutions? What are the technical and policy-related challenges associated with the use of such tools?

The currently available solutions and technologies have already successfully proven to support agriculture on several levels:

• production (agronomic recommendations, water saving, costs optimizations,…),
• financial (credits, insurances),
• market (global and local trading solutions)
• and logistic (supply chain)

The digital adoption just started and the opportunities ahead are tremendous.

Which policies / actions can help? Local and global ecosystem allowing cooperation among public & private, local & global in a sustainable way would further promote digital solutions adoption. Incentives to farmers that adopt digital technologies can boost adoption as well. In micro-insurances several countries are supporting farmers with subsidies. Ideally similar approaches are taken to support farmers that intend to adopt smart sensors, digital agronomic recommendations, data sharing ...

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5. Over the years, a series of different early warming early action systems have been developed by various organizations. How could greater collaboration among the various tools and approaches facilitate their effectiveness in driving policy responses?

Open and free platforms for agriculture data collection, storage and exchange in an anonymized way should be developed and made available to the international community of researchers and developers.

Standardization about data exchange is required as it was during the railway’s standardization at the end of XIX century. Once the above is available, business incentives would do the rest.