40 years on from Ethiopia's catastrophic famine, progress has slid into reverse
3 min read
Forty years ago this week, on 23 October 1984, BBC TV News led with Michael Buerk’s now famous broadcast from northern Ethiopia alerting the world to a catastrophic famine.
I was fourteen years old when I watched that report and it caught my attention like no other news item has since. His haunting opening words are as vivid to me today as they were then:
“Dawn, and as the sun breaks through the piercing chill of night on the plain outside of Korem, it lights up a biblical famine now in the 20th century. This place, say workers here, is the closest thing to hell on earth.”
A few months later, aged fifteen, I ran away from home and managed to get myself to Ethiopia, thinking that somehow, simply by the passion of my desire to do something, I could make a difference.
Unsurprisingly, in Ethiopia, I rapidly discovered that an unskilled fifteen-year-old was not an effective agent of change. But I never forgot what I learned there.
Thankfully due to sustained media attention and popular demand for action driven by Bob Geldof and others, the UK and the world were shaken into action.
In the decades that followed, remarkable success was achieved in reducing global malnutrition and hunger with the proportion of people suffering from severe hunger almost halving between 1990 and 2015.
But now that progress has slid into reverse.
Today as famine takes hold in Sudan, the world must wake up again. Half of Sudan’s population of 24.8 million is suffering from severe hunger – 13.6 million people whose plight is being largely ignored.
In our food-abundant nation, it is hard to imagine the horror of dying from starvation. Yet every day, in Sudan, hundreds of civilians are perishing from lack of food. Experts warn the situation is shaping up to be the worst humanitarian disaster in history – right now in the 21st Century.
Starvation is wielded as a weapon of war in the country, with fighting parties obstructing aid delivery and forcing millions of people to flee their homes.
The UK needs to redouble its efforts with its international partners to secure humanitarian access and bring an end to the fighting. As the ‘pen holder’ on Sudan at the UN, the UK has a special responsibility to make resolving this conflict an international priority.
In the meantime, the UK needs to increase its aid efforts and support local agencies on the ground which can get aid where needed. This will involve overcoming bureaucratic obstacles and accepting a degree of risk but if it is the only way to gain access, these risks are worth taking.
It is imperative to prevent people dying now, and a generation of children from experiencing life-long physical and cognitive damage caused by severe malnutrition, which is an entirely preventable condition.
Acting to tackle malnutrition and hunger is not only the right thing to do but also in our self-interest. The geopolitical implications of an ever-hungrier world cannot be overstated. Hunger drives instability, conflict, and migration, and threatens global security.
The crisis in Ethiopia profoundly shaped my life. It started my interest in international development and politics and led me to the role I have today as CEO of United Against Malnutrition & Hunger, a cross-party and cross-sector alliance of leaders united in the belief no child should die of malnutrition.
Over the past four decades, I have learned that when the world acts in partnership and with determination, positive change can and does happen.
Leaders must step up now so that in forty years we will not look back and ask how the worst humanitarian disaster in memory was allowed to unfold on our watch.
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