This paper discusses application of AVHRR-based Vegetation Health indices (VHI) for early detection and monitoring unusually intensive, long and widespread drought around the globe in the 2000's. The VHI is a new technology developed and tested at NOAA/NESDIS. The VHI is a multi-spectral (visible near infrared and infrared) indices characterizing greenness, vigor and temperature of land surface. They were used as proxy for estimation of moisture and thermal conditions of vegetation canopy and how healthy and potentially productive vegetation is. This methodology was applied globally at NOAA and delivered to the world users (resolution 4 km and 7-day composite) through NOAA web http://www.star.nesdis.noaa.gov/smcd/emb/vci/VH/index.php. The general users' response was positive. In majority of cases droughts were detected early enabling to select mitigation strategies. Besides, VHI showed good potential for monitoring crop and pasture production including an early assessment of possible weather-related losses. Since the 2000's have had several unusually warm years leading to development of intensive and large scale droughts this paper presents VHI-based drought assessments and compares them with in situ data. Moreover, since these droughts impacted agriculture this paper also presents some results of crop losses estimation using different methods. Many examples will be demonstrated, which include 7-year drought in the Horn of Africa, unusual 2007 drought around Black Sea area, which affected eight countries (Russia, Ukraine, Moldova, Rumania, Bulgaria, Greece, Turkey and Georgia), severe spring-summer droughts in the USA's southern Plaines and summer drought in the Western US, drought in Australia and others.