The new weapon for beating hunger – data

A filepic showing internally displaced people arriving in Wau, South Sudan, which had to cancel its independence day celebrations due to a deepening hunger crisis. Several universities in Africa are working on opening up their data so farmers in the region could produce cheaper food. — AFP

With a single smartphone app, you can now get a pretty accurate forecast of the weather anywhere in the world. That’s largely thanks to a decision by science agencies, a decade ago, to put online their satellite data and make it available for free.

“For hundreds of years, NOAA (the US National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration) has been collecting that data. But when it was made open and available, that’s when the apps started appearing,” said Jaime Adams, an international affairs adviser for the US Department of Agriculture.