Food Security Risk Management Toolkit: For Humanitarian Organizations

Russia’s invasion of Ukraine is creating extraordinary shocks for world food prices and commodity supplies. Outside of the human suffering directly resulting from armed conflict, these shocks have reverberated far beyond Europe's borders and will continue to lead to other humanitarian crises and potential political instability around the world.  

Gro Intelligence is offering to partner with humanitarian organizations on a pro bono basis to help identify current crises and tackle those yet to emerge. This goes beyond our Gro For Good efforts, which simply provide all our models and data free of charge, and extends to our team making themselves available to further explain and help navigate the unprecedented impact of this crisis.   

We have put together a Russia-Ukraine resources page to track the implications for global food security on a real-time basis. We are also providing free access to our Humanitarian Food Security Risk Management Toolkit, which models the interconnected impact on commodities like wheat, vegetable oils, and fertilizer that will have far-reaching implications for importing nations, including those in Africa and the Middle East. 

Given the limited access and use of real-time food, climate and economic data to connect the dots across various complex markets, these applications and models will enable NGOs, governments, and companies to have an up-to-date understanding of where the risks are, and where they can have the most impact.

The Toolkit consists of:

Global Balance Sheet for Wheat - Provides supply and demand metrics across major exporting and importing regions, giving the proper context for understanding the global wheat market on a real-time basis daily.

Wheat Yield Models for the world’s major producing regions - These models track all global wheat producers and exporters on a daily basis, including wheat-growing regions of Ukraine and Russia. Gro’s machine learning-based automated yield forecast models cover 80% of global production on a daily basis.

Custom Price Index Application  - Track inflation costs based on product inputs from sunflower oil to sugar and everything in between.

Price and trade data - Detailed local cash prices and export prices at major origins are key indicators of global trade dynamics and allow you to assess competitiveness among regions. Our extensive trade data tracks those flows.

Climate Risk Navigator for Agriculture - Monitors daily growing conditions, weighted for specific crops and regions, to see around the corner for the impact of weather on wheat yields.

Crop Cover Models - Satellite image-based, pixel-level maps of where crops are grown. They are an essential component to Gro’s yield forecast models and can be used to understand the impact of weather events on crop conditions. India is an example. These crop cover models cover Russia and Ukraine and provide acreage estimates of what’s currently planted.