Despite being a slow-moving disaster, famine is notoriously difficult to predict.
The reason for this, experts say, is that severe food shortages are hardly ever about food supply alone.
A famine might be triggered by drought or some other climatic interference in crop production, but other powerful forces usually bring the scourge to full bloom: food price inflation, political instability, military conflict and even too much rain.
“The root cause of famine is extremely complex,” said Franck Bousquet, senior director of the World Bank Fragility, Conflict, and Violence Group (FCV). “Usually, the poorest and most vulnerable are the most affected and the least able to cope with shocks that other populations can absorb. Out of the last 10 major famines, nine have resulted from conflict and war.”
“It’s not only about drought,” he added.
A year after severe food shortages threatened more than 20 million people in countries such as South Sudan, Afghanistan, Somalia and Yemen, a coalition of international organizations say they are partnering with tech companies in an effort to prevent future famines using technology.
The coalition — which includes the World Bank, the United Nations and the International Committee of the Red Cross, as well as companies such as Microsoft, Google and Amazon — said Sunday it is launching a tool called the “Famine Action Mechanism,” a still-evolving algorithm that will use analytics to identify areas that are most likely to experience extreme food shortages.
Modeling such probabilities using AI, officials involved in the effort say, could help international organizations with one of the their biggest challenges when it comes to avoiding famine: securing the release of funding to at-risk areas before it’s too late.
The United Nations says a region reaches the conditions known as famine when daily hunger-related death rate exceeds 2 per 10,000 people. This year, An estimated 124 million people in 51 countries are facing severe food insecurity, according to the World Food Programme.
World Bank officials said the idea for FAM arose last year, when they met with their counterparts in the United Nations to evaluate their response to a recent food crisis in Somalia. Though they had responded to the crisis quickly, they said, they decided to develop an early-warning system to secure funding as quickly as possible. This bureaucratic string-pulling, which is highly depending upon accurately forecasting a potential crisis, is often the final hurdle to saving lives, experts say.
Brad Smith, president of Microsoft, said AI could play a significant role in changing that.
“If we can better predict when and where future famines will occur, we can save lives by responding earlier and more effectively,” Smith said. “Artificial intelligence and machine learning hold huge promise for forecasting and detecting early signs of food shortages, like crop failures, droughts, natural disasters, and conflicts.”
