The terrible 1984 famine in Ethiopia focused the world's attention on the country and the issue of aid as never before. Anyone over the age of 30 remembers something of the events - if not the original TV pictures, then Band Aid and Live Aid, Geldof and Bono. Peter Gill was the first journalist to reach the epicentre of the famine and one of the TV reporters who brought the tragedy to light. This book is the story of what happened to Ethiopia in the 25 years following Live Aid: the place, the people, the westerners who have tried to help, and the wider multinational aid business that has come into being. We saved countless lives in the beginning and continued to save them now, but have we done much else to transform the lives of Ethiopia's poor and set them on a 'development' course that will enable the country to do without us?

For the past thirty years-under both Emperor Haile Selassie and President Mengistu Haile Mariam-Ethiopia suffered continuous war and intermittent famine until every single province has been affected by war to some degree. Evil Days, documents the wide range of violations of basic human rights committed by all sides in the conflict, especially the Mengistu government's direct responsibility for the deaths of at least half a million Ethiopian civilians.

War, famine, pestilence and doctrinaire Marxist-Leninist dictatorship; these are the four horsemen of modern Ethiopia's particular apocalypse. They have combined with one another into a brew more poisonous even than the sum of its parts. Just how a people of such ancient culture and proud history, and of such intelligence and sophistication, could have come to this sad fate requires some words of explanation. That the name Ethiopia has, over the past two decades, become synonymous with starvation, civil war and man's massive inhumanity to his fellow man, is a source of deep pain to Ethiopians everywhere o those in the growing Ethiopian diaspora as much as to those who remain within Ethiopia's borders and of bewilderment and puzzlement to others. There must be a reason for it. This volume, the result of a recent symposium that included two very distinguished former high officials of the Mengistu regime, provides much of the answer.

Abstract: This book discusses the Ethiopian famine of 1984-5 and the relief effort that was conducted to alleviate the suffering. The publication is divided into 2 segments written by different authors. Background to the Ethiopian situation and possibilities for future action are discussed. The details of the administration and history of the famine relief effort are reviewed.

In From Poverty to Famine in Northeast Ethiopia, James McCann engages an interdisciplinary perspective to uncover the historical background to the persistence of famine in the northeast region of Ethiopia. His study focuses on the northern Wallo region, an area that was incorporated into Haile Selassie's modern state system and now one of the most devastated portions of the country. The history of northern Wallo and its position within the modern Ethiopian state is presented through an examination of the circumstances in which its rural population lived, farmed, and adapted to a changing physical environment and political economy between 1900 and 1935. This period also coincided with the most critical years of colonial Africa's incorporation into the world economy. McCann's employment of new field data calls into question previous studies of Africa, which have frequently identified ecological stress and famine as simply the products of capitalist development. What accounts for rural Ethiopia's vulnerability to famine, when it boasts one of Africa's most efficient traditional agricultural systems? To what extent have northern Ethiopian patterns of property, marriage, and ideology resisted or contributed to the overall impoverishment of the rural economy? The answers to these questions are found in McCann's careful examination of the historical, geographic, ecological, and demographic characteristics that have affected northern Wallo's systems of production. This comprehensive description of northern Wallo's historical experience is also instructive in terms of the nature of social change and continuity, and the persistence of famine throughout northern Ethiopia. From Poverty to Famine in Northeastern Ethiopia

An investigation into the conditions of resettlement after the famine.