The United States' system for monitoring famine globally has reportedly been taken offline in response to President Donald Trump's order for a 90-day freeze on nearly all US foreign assistance.
The Famine Early Warning System Network (Fewsnet) was established after the 1984 famine in Ethiopia, as part of a worldwide effort to prevent a repeat of its devastating impact.
It was designed by US government agencies, including its international development body USAID and the space agency Nasa.
It is regarded as a gold standard in combining weather data and political analysis to predict drought and food insecurity globally.
Alongside a model run by the UN, the system allows aid officials to target emergency food supply ahead of time, and is credited with mitigating the effects of a devastating drought in the Horn of Africa in 2016.
It has been used to try to target aid during the current famine in Sudan as the war continues there.
A briefing service provided by the network was stopped as part of Trump's suspension of nearly all foreign assistance, according to a source familiar with Fewsnet's operations.
According to the BBC, when asked about the shutdown, USAID said it was "expeditiously processing exception requests" but could not "address every individual exception-related question".
The network is "insanely important", according to Dave Harden, who oversaw its operation at USAID during the 2016 food security emergency in East Africa.
"Because we had Fewsnet, and we had guard teams, we were able to pre-position food and supplies [in Ethiopia] and plant it in a way that was remarkably different than what happened in 1984," he told the BBC.
Last Friday, the State Department issued a "stop-work" order on all US foreign assistance, worth nearly $70bn a year, with the exception of emergency food aid and military aid to Israel and Egypt, pending a 90-day review to ensure programmes' alignment with Trump's "America First" foreign policy.
Since then, Secretary of State Marco Rubio has expanded the scope of projects eligible for waivers to the order, including for life-saving medicine and shelter, but there remains widespread confusion in the global aid sector, significant parts of which have been upended by the freeze.
SOURCE: BBC
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