interview
“Every euro that farmers save on gasoline can be invested in feeding people” Valentijn Stienen and Joris Wagenaar are developing models to transport farmers to traders and food to disaster areas as quickly as possible. Now they have set their sights on reducing food waste. needs to know how the road runs and whether he can even use the road.”
Text: Laura Bergshoef Photos: Bob Bronshoff
How do you put the weather and the roads together in one model?
G
o to a food ordering site and enter your postal code. Or: open Google Maps and find the nearest supermarket. In the Netherlands, you always know where to find food quickly, “because here all the roads are known,” says PhD student Valentijn Stienen. “But that’s not the case everywhere. Take Indonesia, for example. Many local farmers there have no idea how to transport their food in the most efficient way. In some areas, such as jungles, the road network is not fully mapped. And imagine if a disaster were to take place there. Tens of thousands of people would be without food. It is vital that aid stations know how to bring food there quickly.” To map the road network in Indonesia, Stienen is building a mathematical model. He is doing this with his dissertation supervisor Joris Wagenaar. Both are affiliated with the Zero Hunger Lab and the Tilburg School of Economics and Management. “Weather is also an important part of our model,” says Wagenaar. “Regularly, roads are completely flooded by rain. A farmer
Wagenaar: “The first step is to collect all
the roads in Indonesia in the model. We have attached GPS trackers to trucks that transmit their location every minute. Sometimes we see several trucks driving
Valentijn Stienen 28 | New Scientist | Special Zero Hunger Lab
off a familiar road, into the wilderness. So, apparently there is a road there that is unknown.” Stienen: “The second step is to link the road data to weather data. For example, with the data from the GPS trackers, we can calculate how fast trucks travel along a specific road under certain weather conditions. A road where trucks turn around en masse during
