Miller Magazine Issue: 129 September 2020

46 NEWS MILLER / September 2020 Millions of people around the world face hunger every day, and unfortunately, the COVID-19 pandemic is expected to make the issue of food security even worse. Sat- ellites are helping to alleviate the situation by providing crucial information to monitor crop growth and harvesting from space. Satellites provide crucial data on crops during COVID-19 A recent report from the World Food Programme fore- casts that the COVID-19 pandemic could push over 130 million additional people into chronic hunger by the end of 2020. The pandemic has cau- sed numerous problems and un- certainties along the food supp- ly chain such as limited labour, transport, cross-border trade and the availability of produce. It is important to understand how the pandemic is disrupting the growth and harvest of staple crops as well as the food supply chain, which can be affected by various factors such as shortages of fertiliser, a lack of labour and issues associated with na- tional export policies. These limitations create uncertainty in food markets and, therefore, the availability of food in the future. Satellite monitoring tools are useful as they can provide information on planting and harvesting for key food and agriculture commodities. NASA, ESA and the Japanese Aerospace Exploration Agency (JAXA) wor- ked recently to create the CO- VID-19 Earth Observation Dash- board, a platform that combines a wealth of satellite data to mo- nitor the impacts of COVID-19 worldwide – including agricultu- ral production. A recent study, featured on the dashboard, analysed the harvests of winter cereals over Spain. In Spain, winter cereals are cultivated over almost two million hectares, mainly in the regions of Castilla and León, Andalucia, Castilla-la-Manc-