Ethiopian Famine (1983–1985)
A famine in northern Ethiopia in 1984 and 1985 killed between 400,000 and a million people and was shown on television. The drought was real and was the smallest part of it. Rainfall had failed across the Sahel, and northern Ethiopia had been at war for a decade — the Derg regime fighting secessionist movements in Eritrea and Tigray, with both sides using food as a weapon, burning crops, restricting movement and attacking markets and relief convoys. The government had spent enormously on the tenth anniversary celebrations of the revolution in September 1984 while the harvest failed, and had restricted access to the affected areas. A BBC report by Michael Buerk with film by Mohamed Amin was broadcast on 23 October 1984 and shown by some 425 stations worldwide within days. The response was unprecedented in scale and mostly private: Band Aid's record in December, Live Aid in July 1985 with an audience estimated at 1.5 billion, and some £150 million raised. The aid also became part of the war. The government's resettlement programme moved some 600,000 people from the north to the south, with heavy mortality, and used relief as an inducement; a portion of the aid delivered through government channels supported it, and money delivered to the rebel side bought weapons. The regime fell in 1991. The episode is the standard case study in famine relief and in what publicity can and cannot do. Ethiopia was also exporting food during the famine and had banned trade in grain between provinces. Amartya Sen's argument that famines are failures of entitlement rather than of supply was published the year before and could not have found a clearer illustration. The relief effort also changed the aid industry permanently. Médecins Sans Frontières was expelled from the country in December 1985 for saying publicly that the resettlement programme was killing people, which opened an argument about whether agencies should speak or stay that has not been settled since. Ethiopia has had further droughts, in 2003, 2011 and 2015, with far lower mortality because governments allowed access and markets functioned. The images from 1984 nonetheless fixed a version of the country in western minds that Ethiopians have spent four decades objecting to.
- Year: 1984 CE
- Category: Social
