 A data-driven approach improves food insecurity crisis predictionE.C. Lentz, Hope Michelson, K. Baylis and Y. Zhou World Development, 2019, vol. 122, issue C, 399-409 Abstract: Globally, over 800 million people are food insecure. Current methods for identifying food insecurity crises are not based on statistical models and fail to systematically incorporate readily available data on prices, weather, and demographics. As a result, policymakers cannot rapidly identify food insecure populations. These problems delay responses to mitigate hunger. We develop a replicable, near real-time model incorporating spatially and temporally granular market data, remotely-sensed rainfall and geographic data, and demographic characteristics. We train the model on 2010–2011 data from Malawi and forecast 2013 food security. Our model correctly identifies the food security status of 83 to 99% of the most food insecure village clusters in 2013, depending on the food security measure, while the prevailing approach correctly identifies between 0 and 10%. Our results show the power of modeling food insecurity to provide early warning and suggest model-driven approaches could dramatically improve food insecurity crisis response. Keywords: Food insecurity; Crisis; Prediction; Early warning; Sub-Saharan Africa; Famine (search for similar items in EconPapers) Downloads: (external link) Related works: Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:eee:wdevel:v:122:y:2019:i:c:p:399-409 DOI: 10.1016/j.worlddev.2019.06.008 Access Statistics for this article World Development is currently edited by O. T. Coomes More articles in World Development from Elsevier |
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