18/06/2022
How scientists predict famine before it hits
Decades ago, researchers set a goal to ensure famine never again takes the world by surprise. Despite huge successes, immense untapped potential remains in their forecasting tools.
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For several weeks back in 2018, Yadira Martínez González suddenly had to feed 15 additional mouths. Her husband's relatives, who had emigrated from Colombia to Venezuela decades ago, returned as part of an exodus of millions leaving a crumbling country.
An economic crisis, attributed to alleged corruption and poor financial management, which the country's president and high ranking officials have denied, had caused inflation to spike by over 860%, according to official data. Martínez González’s work selling her crafts alongside one of the few roads traversing the La Guajira desert wasn't enough to buy food for the nearly 40 people who now made up her family. "We didn't eat that much," she says. "Maybe twice, most likely once every day."
She wasn’t the only one with unexpected guests from Venezuela. Without enough food, animals began to disappear in Martínez González’s rural settlement, Palenstu in La Guajira, one of the more than 2,500 villages – known as rancherías – of the Wayúus, Colombia's most numerous indigenous group. As tensions rose on the dusty ground, satellites and local weather stations showed that rains would not arrive. Without help, crops would fail. A famine seemed imminent.
https://www.bbc.com/future/article/20220525-how-scientists-predict-famine-before-it-hits
