<\/p>\n
A wheat harvest in Ukraine.<\/p>\n
(Bloomberg) — Right after Russia\u2019s full-scale invasion of Ukraine, crop scientist Inbal Becker-Reshef got a letter from officials in Kyiv. They wanted to figure out how much wheat and other grains were lost to Vladimir Putin\u2019s occupying forces.<\/p>\n
Most Read from Bloomberg<\/p>\n
Work began on tracking and mapping\u00a0lost crop production using satellites and remote sensing. It\u2019s one of many assignments Becker-Reshef\u00a0and her team of more than 20 scientists\u00a0have\u00a0been tasked with since founding an arm of US space agency NASA that monitors agriculture around\u00a0the world.<\/p>\n
Now, with a total of $7.7\u00a0million in\u00a0early-stage\u00a0funding\u00a0and after another summer of weather shocks, the academic is starting a global rapid crop assessment center to field requests from places hit by disaster and conflict.<\/p>\n
A sort of hotline for governments, aid agencies and farming associations, the aim is to use images from space that are then sifted and interpreted by AI models to predict potential crises early. The results will guide various responses to\u00a0crops and food supply.<\/p>\n
It\u2019s one of the\u00a0projects financed\u00a0by Google.org as part of the foundation\u2019s\u00a0AI Collaborative on Food Security, which funds solutions for getting ahead of hunger crises. Other backers include Microsoft\u2019s AI for Good Lab, startup Planet Labs, NASA and the Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations.<\/p>\n
The needs are getting greater and more frequent. This year alone,\u00a0deadly floods hit Texas, a heat wave struck much of Europe, about 1,000 firefighters tackled a huge wildfire on the edges of Marseille, and sweeping rains in China led to landslides.\u00a0In recent weeks,\u00a0flash floods\u00a0in Pakistan displaced more than 4\u00a0million people, destroying rice and sugarcane crops.<\/p>\n
That\u2019s on the back of several years of shocks to how food is produced, distributed and consumed \u2014 from the coronavirus pandemic and shipping disruptions to multiple conflicts \u2014\u00a0Ukraine, Gaza, Sudan and Tigray to name a few.<\/p>\n
Market volatilities have led governments to impose trade bans, further shaking up supplies and prices of everyday staples.\u00a0The UN\u00a0estimates about 8% of the global population may have faced hunger last year amid increases in Africa and Western Asia.<\/p>\n
\u201cThese requests are becoming more frequent and larger actually, in terms of the analytical requirements,\u201d Becker-Reshef said in an interview from Strasbourg, France, where she heads a research team and\u00a0teaches at the university there.\u00a0\u201cWe cannot meet the need that exists.\u201d<\/p>\n
Story Continues <\/p>\n
Becker-Reshef\u00a0obtained her doctorate in remote sensing and crop-yield forecasting at the University of Maryland in College Park. Her plan is to spin off the new global\u00a0rapid response center from NASA Harvest, which is headquartered at the university.<\/p>\n
The new center will have headquarters\u00a0either in Europe or the US to coordinate urgent assessment requests that could then be distributed across a global network of key partner experts and institutions, she said. Other uses may include predicting how upcoming weather patterns, like La Ni\u00f1a or droughts, will impact food production, or being able to predict harvests in countries that are key to global food security but less transparent.<\/p>\n
The overall funding is miniscule when cuts to aid from US President Donald Trump and growing food shocks are putting pressure on organizations to do more with less.<\/p>\n
\u201cThe risks and threats to people\u2019s food security are going in an increasingly negative direction,\u201d said\u00a0Chris Hegadorn, adjunct professor of global food politics at Sciences Po in Paris. \u201cGovernments are starting to recognize that they need to do something because of these heightened risks. But starting with the US, everybody is in an incredibly tight position. I don’t see the level of resources going up.\u201d<\/p>\n
Becker-Reshef also isn\u2019t alone. Crop-monitoring satellite companies have also multiplied in recent years, while researchers are adding new food security tools to meet the growing needs.<\/p>\n
A Palestinian boy carries a sack of wheat flour in Gaza.Photographer: Ahmad Salem\/Bloomberg
Grain is collected during the summer wheat harvest in Ukraine.Photographer: Andrew Kravchenko\/Bloomberg <\/p>\n
In June, academics at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology unveiled The Jameel Index, which generates food trade vulnerability scores for more than 160 countries, and plans to include the impacts of future climate change scenarios on trade, and to aid planning. Also that month, nonprofit Earth Genome launched an\u00a0app that visualizes a complex network of food flows and global interdependencies.<\/p>\n
While there are organizations working in agriculture and food security, there\u2019s a gap in providing fast intelligence during different kinds of agricultural crises.<\/p>\n
Over a 20-year career, Becker-Reshef has attracted a long list of backers, clients and collaborators. She\u2019s worked with UN\u00a0food agencies, the US Department of Agriculture and the Famine Early Warning Systems Network. She\u2019s involved in the GeoGlam Crop Monitor, a G20 initiative spurred in the wake of food price spikes more than a decade ago, and\u00a0recently joined Microsoft\u2019s AI for Good Lab as managing director.<\/p>\n
At NASA Harvest, which she co-heads, the team has mapped out smallholder farmers in Togo and determined the impact from the derecho windstorm on Iowa\u2019s corn and soybean crops.<\/p>\n
Soybeans are prepared for planting in Iowa.Photographer: Benjamin Roberts\/Bloomberg <\/p>\n
Her team continues to work on Ukraine, one of the key projects, assessing the damage caused by Russia\u2019s invasion, monitoring new crop planting and quantifying farmland that\u2019s been abandoned, particularly that on the front lines. In terms of impact, the information given to\u00a0Kyiv\u00a0 helped officials avoid any potential grain export restrictions, something that would have further increased the shock to the food supply chain from the war.<\/p>\n
The team is also working on quantifying the damage to rice from floods in Pakistan, and the impact on crops in abandoned areas spurred by the civil war in Sudan, with similar requests for North Kivu in the Democratic Republic of Congo.<\/p>\n
\u201cWe\u2019ve done a lot,\u201d said Becker-Reshef. \u201cBut actually we\u2019ve done just a fraction of what we are asked.\u201d<\/p>\n
Most Read from Bloomberg Businessweek<\/p>\n
\u00a92025 Bloomberg L.P.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"A wheat harvest in Ukraine. (Bloomberg) — Right after Russia\u2019s full-scale invasion of Ukraine, crop scientist Inbal Becker-Reshef…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":151628,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[23],"tags":[64,63,1071,101705,101704,11584,101701,101702,131,101706,128,285,5525,101703],"class_list":{"0":"post-151627","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-space","8":"tag-au","9":"tag-australia","10":"tag-bloomberg","11":"tag-crop","12":"tag-food-and-agriculture-organization-of-the-united-nations","13":"tag-food-production","14":"tag-food-supply","15":"tag-inbal-becker-reshef","16":"tag-nasa","17":"tag-rapid-response-center","18":"tag-science","19":"tag-space","20":"tag-ukraine","21":"tag-wheat-harvest"},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/151627","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=151627"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/151627\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/151628"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=151627"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=151627"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=151627"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}