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People and Pixels Linking Remote Sensing and Social Science (1998) / Chapter Skim
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9 Social Science and Remote Sensing in Famine Early Warning
Pages 189-196

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From page 189...
... Between 1975 and the present, several systems have evolved for monitoring food conditions, primarily in Africa. An increasingly sophisticated array of tools has been applied to the problem, including a number of satellite remote sensing techniques (Hutchinson, 1991~.
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From page 190...
... . The tool developed to describe food status was a national "food balance sheet" in which food demand as a function of population size was weighed against agricultural production for the current year, plus scheduled imports and food stocks carried over from previous years.
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From page 191...
... to describe vegetation conditions, and both have added rainfall estimates based on cloud observations derived from the European Meteosat satellite (Snijders, 1991~. Despite improved estimates of food production from satellite data, it became obvious that famine was more complex than a simple failure of food supply.
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From page 192...
... Efforts continued to focus on gathering and analyzing secondary aggregate data, but there was a gradual shift from the simple convergence-of-evidence approach to an approach that attempted to interpret data with regard to how they might reflect household response to current conditions. Watts (1983)
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From page 193...
... I., of _ c to ·e ~ ~-~1 1 \ l rune FIGURE 9-1 Household responses to the threat of food security emergencies. 193 l Crop ~ LiveStoCIc Adjustments ~Dict change 1 Leonine food usp ~` Grain loan from Icin 1 1 Labor sales (migration)
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From page 194...
... has opened opportunities for further integration of remote sensing and social science in famine early warning. Certainly there have been significant advances in the power with which aggregate data (e.g., district-level production data)
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From page 195...
... With a more specific understanding of household behaviors, it will be possible to offer differential interpretations of the effects of an emergency on different households and different areas using the same monitoring data. At present, discussion of the involvement of social science in the food security community is restricted primarily to what the fields of anthropology and geography might contribute to an improved understanding of household behavior, largely through the use of rapid qualitative field survey methods combined with the use of geographic information systems to provide a link to routinely reported aggregate data.
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From page 196...
... 1991 Rainfall monitoring based on Meteosat data a comparison of techniques applied to the western Sahel. International Journal of Remote Sensing l 2: 1331 - 1347.
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Key Terms

  • global information
  • food security
  • growing season
  • satellite data
  • field survey

  • vulnerability assessment
  • food economy
  • food balance
  • balance sheet
  • economy approach

  • international journal
  • food stocks
  • crop production
  • monitoring based
  • food supply

  • regional monitoring
  • informal meeting
  • secondary aggregate
  • monitoring data
  • current conditions

  • security emergencies
  • agriculture organization
  • household response
  • key informants
  • suggest food

  • household responses
  • household economies
  • commit household
  • analyzing secondary
  • obvious target


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