Fine-grained prediction of food insecurity using news streams

Abstract

Anticipating the outbreak of a food crisis is crucial to efficiently allocate emergency relief and reduce human suffering. However, existing food insecurity early warning systems rely on risk measures that are often delayed, outdated, or incomplete. Here, we leverage recent advances in deep learning to extract high-frequency precursors to food crises from the text of a large corpus of news articles about fragile states published between 1980 and 2020. Our text features are causally grounded, interpretable, validated by existing data, and