Ethiopia Famine: 40th Anniversary

Baroness D'Souza Excerpts

Thursday 17th October 2024 Lords Chamber

[Baroness D’Souza (CB)]

My Lords, I too congratulate the noble Baroness on securing this debate. “Make poverty history” was the mantra in 1984, and who will forget the pictures of tiny children starving to death? Never again, we said. Indeed, while there has been remarkable progress in Ethiopia in the intervening years, certainly between 1990 and 2015 there has been a clear reversal, due in large part to conflict. It is estimated that something like 4.7 million women and children are in need of emergency assistance, reflecting a global trend of malnutrition once again becoming the leading cause of death in children under five. We hear these figures with a kind of resignation: it is too large a problem for any one source to deal with. But it remains an obscenity that we have what, in many cases, can be called deliberate starvation—a term far stronger than “manmade famine”.

We see two shocking examples in Gaza and Sudan: the deliberate blocking of life-saving humanitarian aid to those most in need—a clear flouting of international humanitarian law. I often wonder how many of us actually imagine what it is like to say to our children or grandchildren, whose stomachs are cramped with hunger, “No supper tonight, and nothing tomorrow, but there might be some food in the future”. It is unthinkable.

There are, of course, some uncontrollable causes of food shortage, through drought, disease or pestilence, but food shortages in these conditions do not necessarily imply famine. Famine is a phenomenon against which whole communities use their last possible defence: to uproot and trek to where food might be available. In this final stage, mass deaths from hunger and disease are inevitable. However, there are many discernible stages before this catastrophic uprooting, all of which can be managed, for example, by ensuring that the price of staples remains affordable, with cash incentives and food for work.

Working in Africa and Asia many years ago, it became clear to me that all vulnerable societies have food shortage survival mechanisms. Some of these centre around diversification of income sources. For example, a village woman may grow crops, weave baskets for sale in markets, brew local beer or ensure that some family members leave the rural area to become wage labourers in towns.

Rural groups often develop life-saving transactional relations with neighbours and with distant relations. All these strategies stand populations in good stead when food shortage is threatened. In this context, we should persistently monitor how far development agencies bolster these intelligent choices, or whether they perhaps instead focus on introducing new techniques which have no inbuilt protection elements.

In today’s world, the most devastating cases of starvation arise due to artificial man-made actions—as I have said, deliberate starvation. These include the forcible movement of populations by militias, the destruction and/or pilfering of food crop stores, control of markets as means of punishing one ethnic group or another, and the deliberate blocking of humanitarian aid.

We are dealing with the impossible—armies and militia groups marauding, bombing and making all coping mechanisms immediately redundant, as was the case in Ethiopia in 1984, when government policies of mass population relocation followed by a widespread cholera epidemic caused mass deaths from starvation. One has only to remember Mao Tse-Tung’s Great Leap Forward, the devastating famine of the 1960s, when the entire country was forced to abandon agriculture in order to manufacture steel in their back yards. A conservative estimate at that time was that 20 million people died.

What can be done? I believe that the international community can insist on accountability and culpability for abuses of the right to humanitarian aid, using some of the following channels. There should be meticulous monitoring of efforts to interrupt or block humanitarian aid, naming names and following up with prosecutions. I really would like to see a dedicated unit, UN-sponsored or otherwise, to note and list all those involved, including government agencies and armies. New food supplements should be developed for easy, effective and rapid distribution, possibly using drones, along with increased ratification of international instruments safeguarding the rights of civilians in armed conflict. Freedom of movement should be safeguarded and non-voluntary relocation prohibited, and the right of free access to humanitarian assistance for everyone should be affirmed.