Ethiopia Famine: 40th Anniversary

Baroness Helic Excerpts

Thursday 17th October 2024 Lords Chamber

[Baroness Helic (Con)]

My Lords, I thank the noble Baroness, Lady Featherstone, for introducing this crucial debate.

As many noble Lords have already said—it is worth repeating—the Ethiopian famine of the 1980s was one of the most devastating humanitarian crises of the last century, claiming up to a million lives and displacing millions more. It shocked the world into action. However, famine is not just a historical tragedy. It remains a deadly weapon in modern conflicts, including in Ethiopia.

I personally witnessed the use of food as a weapon during the 1990s, when the Bosnian Serb army laid siege to Sarajevo. My friends and relatives perished, some from bombings and others due to a lack of food and medicine. I also recall the so-called UN safe area of Srebrenica, where mass starvation of the civilian population preceded the genocide. Ethiopia’s tragedy should have served as a warning—a call to ensure that such horrors were never repeated—yet, in some cases, the lessons learned have been exploited to further weaponise food, with dire consequences.

It is worth reflecting on what this means in practice. The suffering inflicted on families deliberately deprived of the means of sustaining life is horrific; the effects persist long after the fighting. Children in the final stages of starvation endure their bodies self-cannibalising. Growth ceases. Limbs wither, bones decay and organs shrink. In the South Sudanese conflict, for example, women and girls were raped. They were forced into marriage and prostitution to survive. Single women, female-headed households, adolescent girls, elderly women, women with disabilities, and children are at particular risk.

Today, in Tigray, where food was used as a weapon during the recent conflict, the situation is particularly dire. Some 3.5 million people—more than half of the region’s population—require aid throughout the year. The root cause is the war’s devastation, which has plunged Tigray into extreme poverty. Soldiers were stealing and destroying food, destroying farms and livestock, vandalising water systems and obstructing humanitarian aid. Although natural disasters such as droughts and floods may seem inevitable, famine is often a man-made crisis, resulting from a deliberate withholding of supplies and a failure to act, leading to inhumane and catastrophic outcomes.

The integrated food security phase classification system warned recently of catastrophic and emergency levels of food insecurity across Haiti, the DRC, Sudan, Gaza and Afghanistan. USAID has described the crisis in Sudan as potentially even worse than the Ethiopian famine of the 1980s. The Norwegian Refugee Council stated that,

“Sudan is experiencing a starvation crisis of historic proportions. And yet, the silence is deafening. People are dying of hunger, every day, and yet the focus remains on semantic debates and legal definitions”.


I therefore welcome the noble Lord’s personal commitment to this region and look forward to more progress than we have made so far.

Although the climate crisis is a leading cause of the global rise in hunger, with climate shocks destroying crops, livelihoods and communities’ ability to sustain themselves, nearly 70% of the 309 million people facing acute hunger are in fragile or conflict-ridden countries. Violence and instability in regions such as the Middle East, Africa, the Caribbean, South Asia and eastern Europe disrupt food production, displace populations and often hinder humanitarian access to those in need.

The weaponisation of food is a political and military strategy intended to inflict suffering. However, rather than securing military victories, these policies fuel further violence and sow seeds of long-term instability. Since Defense Minister Gallant’s speech on 10 October, the Government in Israel have targeted food supplies, healthcare facilities and water infrastructure, cut communications and blocked humanitarian aid. Recently, humanitarian assistance was denied to 400,000 civilians in north Gaza. We decided to intervene, in particular the United States, and four days ago a letter was sent to Minister Gallant requiring assurances that American aid would not be arbitrarily restricted or obstructed, and signalling a potential halt to arms transfers if it was. The pressure seems to have worked, as 50 trucks were immediately allowed in; more might follow. However, it has taken way too long. One might cynically attribute this belated intervention by the US Administration to the upcoming US elections and competition for votes. Just imagine what a timely, earlier intervention, combined with a concerted diplomatic pressure, could have achieved, and the lives that might have been saved as a consequence.

The impact extends beyond hunger. Famine tears apart communities, weakens state structures and contributes to atrocities such as sexual violence. Famine often leads to forced resettlement, leading to overcrowding, insecurity and chaos, which creates the enabling environment for rampant sexual violence. Perpetrators frequently exploit the depleted protection mechanisms to inflict horrific suffering. The stories of sex for food and of sexual starvation crimes in Tigray and Sudan have been tragic examples of this.

We must act, not only because it is morally right and our common humanity demands it but because it serves our national interest. The unanimous adoption of UN Security Council Resolution 2417 in 2018 was a milestone in recognising the links between conflict and hunger, yet today, Sudan’s conflict has ignited a hunger crisis of historic proportions. Without urgent action, hunger will claim more lives than the fighting itself.

Hunger is not merely a byproduct of conflict. It results from deliberate choices by warring parties to ignore international law, disrupt food systems, displace populations and obstruct aid. It often may appear that nothing can be done. That is not the case. We must prioritise ending fighting and ensuring respect for international humanitarian law. This includes insisting upon unhindered access for humanitarian aid, whenever and wherever, across borders and front lines; the protection of civilians and essential infrastructure; monitoring and mitigating threats to children, women and girls at risk of abuse due to food insecurity; helping to boost food production through steps such as the removal of mines from farmland; and supporting local communities.

In 2021, we committed to the G7 famine prevention and humanitarian crises compact, pledging to uphold UN Security Council Resolutions 2417 and 2286, yet we have lost momentum. I therefore urge the Government to recommit to these resolutions, particularly Resolution 2417, which condemns the starving of civilians and unlawfully denying humanitarian access.

Sadly, the famine of the 1980s was not an isolated incident. It was a collective failure to prevent and respond to policies of collective punishment that were repeated elsewhere. The culture of impunity persists, allowing the weaponisation of food and abuse to go unchecked. I hope that we can learn from the past and from our own mistakes. The best way to honour victims is to use every tool to ensure that starvation can no longer be used with impunity as a weapon of war. For that, we must act decisively, not just to respond but to prevent future conflicts and famines.