Managing Famine Risk

The use of famine early warning systems to anticipate and mitigate food crises provides a major opportunity to save more lives, protect more livelihoods, check rising costs, and close the widening funding gap. But all too often the link between early warning and early action fails, and the opportunity to mitigate a gathering crisis is lost. Rob Bailey considers in detail the various political, institutional, and organizational barriers to translating early warning of famine into early action to avert it, and he offers recommendations for overcoming them.