http://ireport.cnn.com/docs/DOC-1282043?ref=feeds%2Flatest
Thirty years of talking about famine in Ethiopia – why’s nothing changed? BBC
By Habtamu7 | Posted
November 12, 2015
By Amelia Butterly
“There will not be famine of any sort, let alone anything remotely
like the magnitude of that of 1984,” says the Ethiopian Embassy in
London.15046818703_c57eae097c
For people aged over 30, that sentence, coming from Ethiopian
officials, holds a special kind of meaning.
Because those people saw the TV reports in the 1980s showing thousands
of children and adults starving to death.
Now, three decades on, the United Nations is warning that 15 million
Ethiopians will need food aid by 2016.
This week’s BBC report has been described as “sensational” by the
Ethiopian Embassy.
In it, one man who lived through the famines of the 1980s says he
expects the same thing will happen to Ethiopia again in the coming
months.
First broadcast in October 1984, Michael Buerk’s iconic news report
showed the “biblical famine”.
In the years before online videos, social media and internet news, his
words still managed to reach around the world, with the footage being
shown by more than 400 television stations worldwide.
Within weeks he’d gathered some of the biggest names in music, created
Band Aid and recorded Do They Know It’s Christmas?
The single raised millions. Then, in 1985, they put on Live Aid, a
concert held in the US and the UK which was watched by an estimated
1.9 billion people.
The message is clear; drought caused crops to fail resulting in
widespread famine.
But critics of the song say the causes of the crisis were more
complex, with the policies of the government in Ethiopia partly to
blame.
“Thousands were dying every week, the impact of drought compounded by
the Marxist regime being in denial about the famine’s severity and by
the region being caught up in civil war,” writes BBC correspondent
Mike Wooldridge 30 years later.
The efforts of celebrities, charities, governments and the general
public meant that it was only a matter of weeks after the Michael
Buerk’s BBC reports before aid started to reach the region.
Death rates still remained high for some time after the aid began
arriving – more than a million were killed by the famine overall.
But the years since have still seen famine in that part of Africa.
Many people still rely on foreign food aid, illiteracy is a problem
and the late 1990s saw conflict and thousands of deaths over a border
dispute with Eritrea.
“The sensational news broadcast by BBC TV, regarding children dying on
a daily basis, does not reflect the current broad reality on the
ground and the full preparation that has gone into overcoming the
problem,” the Ethiopian Embassy said in its statement.
The Ethiopian government has set aside nearly £130m to deal with the crisis.
But the UN says another £330m is needed.
It says drought has already caused problems and a lack of rain has
meant that in the worst affected areas there are 10% of the crops
farmers would usually expect.
In one region, it says, two babies have been dying every day
Received on Sun Nov 15 2015 - 22:42:37 EST