The World Comes to the Rescue

By Awake! correspondent in South Africa

“ONE of the world’s greatest disasters.” “The biggest disaster to strike the planet since World War Two devastated Europe.” That is how different authors describe Africa’s recent famine.

“In one year,” claims the magazine Newsweek, “as many as 1 million Ethiopian peasants and 500,000 Sudanese children died.” In Mozambique a hundred thousand people are reported to have perished, and for a time, a thousand died each month in Chad.

The world came to the rescue, but for countless Africans it was too late. In some cases the delay was caused by officials who concealed the true extent of the famine. The ignoring of hungry citizens contributed to the overthrow of the Sudanese government in 1985.

In March 1984, Ethiopia appealed to the world for 450,000 tons of emergency grain. This was no exaggeration, for the actual need was twice that amount. Yet the United Nations and its member states paid little heed. Less than 100,000 tons of grain was offered, at a time when world grain surpluses approached 190,000,000 tons! To make matters worse, the small supplies of food took months to arrive. Meanwhile, people were starving. The death toll in one relief camp reached a hundred per day.

Then in October 1984 a British television crew was delayed while waiting for a change of planes in Ethiopia. They used the time to visit relief camps and filmed humans starving to death. “I cried when I was editing this film,” said cameraman Mohammed Amin. “I actually broke down and cried.”

A Dramatic Response

The film was shown on BBC television news and repeated on 425 networks throughout the world. Its effect was dramatic. An angry public demanded government action. Pop musicians turned their lucrative trade into appeals for charity and, to date, have raised over a hundred million dollars! All this publicity resulted in one of the greatest relief programs the world has ever seen.

Shipments of surplus grain began pouring into Africa. Governments of Europe cooperated in an airlift of food deep into Sudan. Even more remarkable was the joint operation to get food to the highlands of Ethiopia. In his book Ethiopia: The Challenge of Hunger, Graham Hancock described the scene at Addis Ababa’s Bole Airport: “Aircraft with Russian, American, East German, British and a medley of other markings were lined up on the apron loading emergency food supplies . . . It was like a vision of all the lofty principles that the United Nations stands for suddenly brought to life, and I could almost hear the swords being beaten into ploughshares.”

Though late, the world’s response to Africa’s need is said to have saved over three million lives! But, sadly, Africa is still short of food. According to recent reports, millions in Ethiopia, Sudan, and Mozambique face starvation. ‘Why,’ you may wonder, ‘is Africa unable to feed itself?’ And even more important, ‘What is the real solution?’

[Picture Credit Line on page 3]

FAO photo