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Famine and Foreigners: Ethiopia Since Live Aid
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 epicenter 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 continue 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 thrive?
304 pages, Paperback
First published July 8, 2010
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January 3, 2011
I cannot praise this book enough. Usually I am wary of journalists who purport expertise in international relations. Too often, they take limited experience of a few days visit to a trouble zone as reason to pontificate at length on whole cultures and histories.
In Gill's case, he knows his limitations and he caveats his on-the-ground experiences sufficiently that one soon finds one trusting his judgement on the big issues - especially on his report of the growing critique in the academy of the vested interest of the international NGOS and their sometimes counter-productive alliances with Western 'progressive' Governments.
Meles Zenawi of Ethiopia does not come out of this story flawless (he seems to have got trapped into repressive tit-for-tat, partly thanks to the initial blunderings of the EU Observer during the 2005 Elections) but he is pictured for what he is - a highly intelligent man struggling with a country that is desperately poor, with a rapidly growing population, ethnically fraught and which has suffered two major regime changes in under half a century.
Gill also calls it straight on why the Chinese are doing well in Africa - they build roads and understand anti-colonialist national struggle - and on why the prognosis for Ethiopia, probably for Africa, may be poor - the malign often faith-based refusal to deal with the population explosion. Chinese officials also seem to be accessible and open to a journalist with a refreshing lack of ‘spin’.
For someone who is strong critic of the Catholic Church, I was pleased to have my hard line position corrected in one respect. It was ’nice but dim’ ordinary decent Catholics who first notified the wider world of the 2008 famine. Sadly the same basically decent life-savers sit alongside the Muslims as a profoundly negative force for population management, which requires not so much Chinese-style forcefulness as female self-empowerment, investment in education and social change at the expense of male patriarchs.
The NGOs get mixed reviews. Some are truly great in aspiration and in delivery but are trapped between the need to humiliate developing country governments to get traction for increased donations in the West and the lure of Western Governments who offer a devil's deal of influence and funds in return for obedience as vectors for soft power, perhaps made most unpleasant in the so-called failing states.
Ethiopia has always been an experimental cock-pit for the NGOs. Indeed, this is the primary reason for reading this book – to knock out of oneself excessive sentimentality about humanitarianism. Ethiopia does not see the political abuses by NGOs in Iraq, Afghanistan or Gaza but it has seen its share of political dabbling as well as of genuinely effective relief efforts.
At the end of the day, the close linkage of Western governance policy with aid delivery has been dreadfully destructive and politically naïve. Letting the essentially religious mentality of humanitarian agencies and progressive politicians into the practical business of politics in the developing world means that men who start with the best intentions like Zenawi can get forced by circumstances into no-win situations.
The profoundly damaging progressive ideas of Amartya Sen, once taken out of their Indian context, are contrasted, in this book , with Zenawi’s own developmental perspective, closer to that of the Chinese where democracy comes only with prosperity – Zenawi is, of course, right. The West in its dealings with Africa is either very, very stupid or very, very morally degenerate – one suspects that the degenerate empire-preservers often lead the ‘useful idiots’ of progressive humanitarianism by the nose.
Unless, of course, Africans take the Chinese way out and defer democracy until development has actually taken place. Ethiopian dissidents do not seem to have the answer to mass poverty because they are obsessed with rights and democracy in a country that is not yet in a fit state to offer those rights to everyone equally. Rarely do you hear the voice of redistribution ….
Worse the interference of EU ideologues and extremists amongst the radicals (to the despair of many moderates) means that Zenawi is now going backwards, away from his original coalitional strategy towards increased authoritarianism. Blunder after blunder by political elements in the NGO-Western Government alliance have threatened to turn the clock back.
This book provides little opinion. It does what good journalism should do. It lays out a clear narrative based on the facts and it raises questions in an non-academic way for the general reader. He covers the recent history of Ethiopia, the successive famine crises, the struggle over democratisation in and since 2005 and the challenges the country faces as its population doubles twice between 1984 and 2034 and as a global financial crisis cuts into aid budgets that are increasingly politically directed.
But it made me more pessimistic about Africa than I expected – continued foreign interference and aid with strings distort the internal dynamics of local states, creating dependency just as the money starts to run out in the West. The ‘Chinese way’, a cold-hearted but disciplined national development approach played for the long term, is likely to become increasingly fashionable. Europe – far more than the US – only has itself to blame.
Zenawi may have been in power too long and maybe he needs a more liberal Medvedev to his Putin but he may still be the most intellectually capable leader on the Continent. The West would do well to give him a bit of lee way to see if he can return to his coalitional quasi-democratic plans and ensure that he can feed his fast-growing and youthful population and handle the next major, possibly inevitable, famine.
In Gill's case, he knows his limitations and he caveats his on-the-ground experiences sufficiently that one soon finds one trusting his judgement on the big issues - especially on his report of the growing critique in the academy of the vested interest of the international NGOS and their sometimes counter-productive alliances with Western 'progressive' Governments.
Meles Zenawi of Ethiopia does not come out of this story flawless (he seems to have got trapped into repressive tit-for-tat, partly thanks to the initial blunderings of the EU Observer during the 2005 Elections) but he is pictured for what he is - a highly intelligent man struggling with a country that is desperately poor, with a rapidly growing population, ethnically fraught and which has suffered two major regime changes in under half a century.
Gill also calls it straight on why the Chinese are doing well in Africa - they build roads and understand anti-colonialist national struggle - and on why the prognosis for Ethiopia, probably for Africa, may be poor - the malign often faith-based refusal to deal with the population explosion. Chinese officials also seem to be accessible and open to a journalist with a refreshing lack of ‘spin’.
For someone who is strong critic of the Catholic Church, I was pleased to have my hard line position corrected in one respect. It was ’nice but dim’ ordinary decent Catholics who first notified the wider world of the 2008 famine. Sadly the same basically decent life-savers sit alongside the Muslims as a profoundly negative force for population management, which requires not so much Chinese-style forcefulness as female self-empowerment, investment in education and social change at the expense of male patriarchs.
The NGOs get mixed reviews. Some are truly great in aspiration and in delivery but are trapped between the need to humiliate developing country governments to get traction for increased donations in the West and the lure of Western Governments who offer a devil's deal of influence and funds in return for obedience as vectors for soft power, perhaps made most unpleasant in the so-called failing states.
Ethiopia has always been an experimental cock-pit for the NGOs. Indeed, this is the primary reason for reading this book – to knock out of oneself excessive sentimentality about humanitarianism. Ethiopia does not see the political abuses by NGOs in Iraq, Afghanistan or Gaza but it has seen its share of political dabbling as well as of genuinely effective relief efforts.
At the end of the day, the close linkage of Western governance policy with aid delivery has been dreadfully destructive and politically naïve. Letting the essentially religious mentality of humanitarian agencies and progressive politicians into the practical business of politics in the developing world means that men who start with the best intentions like Zenawi can get forced by circumstances into no-win situations.
The profoundly damaging progressive ideas of Amartya Sen, once taken out of their Indian context, are contrasted, in this book , with Zenawi’s own developmental perspective, closer to that of the Chinese where democracy comes only with prosperity – Zenawi is, of course, right. The West in its dealings with Africa is either very, very stupid or very, very morally degenerate – one suspects that the degenerate empire-preservers often lead the ‘useful idiots’ of progressive humanitarianism by the nose.
Unless, of course, Africans take the Chinese way out and defer democracy until development has actually taken place. Ethiopian dissidents do not seem to have the answer to mass poverty because they are obsessed with rights and democracy in a country that is not yet in a fit state to offer those rights to everyone equally. Rarely do you hear the voice of redistribution ….
Worse the interference of EU ideologues and extremists amongst the radicals (to the despair of many moderates) means that Zenawi is now going backwards, away from his original coalitional strategy towards increased authoritarianism. Blunder after blunder by political elements in the NGO-Western Government alliance have threatened to turn the clock back.
This book provides little opinion. It does what good journalism should do. It lays out a clear narrative based on the facts and it raises questions in an non-academic way for the general reader. He covers the recent history of Ethiopia, the successive famine crises, the struggle over democratisation in and since 2005 and the challenges the country faces as its population doubles twice between 1984 and 2034 and as a global financial crisis cuts into aid budgets that are increasingly politically directed.
But it made me more pessimistic about Africa than I expected – continued foreign interference and aid with strings distort the internal dynamics of local states, creating dependency just as the money starts to run out in the West. The ‘Chinese way’, a cold-hearted but disciplined national development approach played for the long term, is likely to become increasingly fashionable. Europe – far more than the US – only has itself to blame.
Zenawi may have been in power too long and maybe he needs a more liberal Medvedev to his Putin but he may still be the most intellectually capable leader on the Continent. The West would do well to give him a bit of lee way to see if he can return to his coalitional quasi-democratic plans and ensure that he can feed his fast-growing and youthful population and handle the next major, possibly inevitable, famine.
March 9, 2023
LITERATURE in PUNK ROCK - Books #14-15
BOOKS:
- Famine and Foreigners: Ethiopia Since Live Aid (Gill)
- Live Aid: World Wide Concert Book (Hillmore)
SONG: How to Get Your Band on TV by Chumbawumba
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CNs4Y...
Chumbawumba's first LP, Pictures of Starving Children Sell Records (1986), was a critique of the Live Aid concert organized by Bob Geldof, which they argued was primarily a cosmetic spectacle designed to draw attention away from the real political causes of world hunger.
Live Aid was a single-day (16-hour) concert split between venues in two cities (Wembley in London; JFK in Philadelphia) to raise awareness and financial support for the fight against famine in Ethiopia. Dozens of rock stars played the July 13, 1985 event, including Paul McCartney, Queen, U2, The Who, Led Zeppelin (reunited with Phil Collins on drums).
“For us, to mix star culture with the inequality of the world and not have any politics about what was happening in the developing world was wrong,” Alice Nutter of Chumbawumba explains. “Our view of it was that you cannot have this concern about world hunger and then have Phil Collins fly halfway across the world and not understand the politics of world hunger.”
- The Anarcho-Punk History of Chumbwumba
https://daily.bandcamp.com/features/c...
---------------------------------------------------
The politics surrounding humanitarian aid in Ethiopia from Live Aid forward remain controversial.
The 1983-1984 famine remains the worst of the many periodic famines in the history of Ethiopia/Abyssinia, with an estimated death toll of 1.2 million (a contested conservative estimate). The official cause is ascribed as a multi-year drought period; however, the unprecedented destructive magnitude begs further explanation. Current scholarly analysis has identified multiple human rights abuses as the primary causative factor for over half of all famine mortality.
The primary recipient of Live Aid was the Derg (a Mengistu Haile Mariam-led military dictatorship of Ethiopia). The Derg coupled famine-relief policy with their approach to separatist guerrilla movements in northern Eritrea and Tigray: a process which involved dismantling tribes in a military-enforced resettlement program which hundreds of thousand consequently died.
The Derg were infamous in using hunger as a weapon. In the pre-famine period Derg government troops systematically scorched the farmlands, destroyed crops and killed oxen of suspected counter-insurgency areas in the Northern provinces of Tigre and Eritrea. The Derg then refused to allow Live Aid-based aid to be delivered across these lines of war in Tigre, Eritrea, and the northern portions of Wollo: areas which comprised ~60 percent of the country’s famine victims. Such consequences called to mind the urgent request of Medicins Sans Frontiers (Doctors without Borders) to Bob Geldoff: don't not release the money until there is a reliable infrastructure to get aid to the victims.
Six years later, there was a glimmer of hope for such infrastructure when the Derg was overthrown by the Ethiopian People's Revolutionary Democratic Front (EPRDF). However, this hope was overshadowed by a harrowing question: did famine-based humanitarian aid prolong the Ethiopian Civil war? A scholarly analysis of DC-based Human Rights Watch written by renowned researcher Alex de Waal concludes: [t]he humanitarian effort prolonged the war, and with it, human suffering. This view also being shared by the acting Prime Minister of the EPRDF whom led the overthrow of the Derg.
Oh, that new glimmer of hope for infrastructure in 1991 was beset by a bumpy road when the accountability of Humanitarian Aid NGOs and the imposition of (neoliberal) "conditionalities" met with autocratic tradition in Ethiopia (per opposing perspectives).
BOOKS:
- Famine and Foreigners: Ethiopia Since Live Aid (Gill)
- Live Aid: World Wide Concert Book (Hillmore)
SONG: How to Get Your Band on TV by Chumbawumba
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CNs4Y...
Chumbawumba's first LP, Pictures of Starving Children Sell Records (1986), was a critique of the Live Aid concert organized by Bob Geldof, which they argued was primarily a cosmetic spectacle designed to draw attention away from the real political causes of world hunger.
Live Aid was a single-day (16-hour) concert split between venues in two cities (Wembley in London; JFK in Philadelphia) to raise awareness and financial support for the fight against famine in Ethiopia. Dozens of rock stars played the July 13, 1985 event, including Paul McCartney, Queen, U2, The Who, Led Zeppelin (reunited with Phil Collins on drums).
“For us, to mix star culture with the inequality of the world and not have any politics about what was happening in the developing world was wrong,” Alice Nutter of Chumbawumba explains. “Our view of it was that you cannot have this concern about world hunger and then have Phil Collins fly halfway across the world and not understand the politics of world hunger.”
- The Anarcho-Punk History of Chumbwumba
https://daily.bandcamp.com/features/c...
---------------------------------------------------
The politics surrounding humanitarian aid in Ethiopia from Live Aid forward remain controversial.
The 1983-1984 famine remains the worst of the many periodic famines in the history of Ethiopia/Abyssinia, with an estimated death toll of 1.2 million (a contested conservative estimate). The official cause is ascribed as a multi-year drought period; however, the unprecedented destructive magnitude begs further explanation. Current scholarly analysis has identified multiple human rights abuses as the primary causative factor for over half of all famine mortality.
The primary recipient of Live Aid was the Derg (a Mengistu Haile Mariam-led military dictatorship of Ethiopia). The Derg coupled famine-relief policy with their approach to separatist guerrilla movements in northern Eritrea and Tigray: a process which involved dismantling tribes in a military-enforced resettlement program which hundreds of thousand consequently died.
The Derg were infamous in using hunger as a weapon. In the pre-famine period Derg government troops systematically scorched the farmlands, destroyed crops and killed oxen of suspected counter-insurgency areas in the Northern provinces of Tigre and Eritrea. The Derg then refused to allow Live Aid-based aid to be delivered across these lines of war in Tigre, Eritrea, and the northern portions of Wollo: areas which comprised ~60 percent of the country’s famine victims. Such consequences called to mind the urgent request of Medicins Sans Frontiers (Doctors without Borders) to Bob Geldoff: don't not release the money until there is a reliable infrastructure to get aid to the victims.
Six years later, there was a glimmer of hope for such infrastructure when the Derg was overthrown by the Ethiopian People's Revolutionary Democratic Front (EPRDF). However, this hope was overshadowed by a harrowing question: did famine-based humanitarian aid prolong the Ethiopian Civil war? A scholarly analysis of DC-based Human Rights Watch written by renowned researcher Alex de Waal concludes: [t]he humanitarian effort prolonged the war, and with it, human suffering. This view also being shared by the acting Prime Minister of the EPRDF whom led the overthrow of the Derg.
Oh, that new glimmer of hope for infrastructure in 1991 was beset by a bumpy road when the accountability of Humanitarian Aid NGOs and the imposition of (neoliberal) "conditionalities" met with autocratic tradition in Ethiopia (per opposing perspectives).
May 8, 2018
Well-written, balanced view of humanitarian aid and famines in Ethiopia. I wished there was more detail and analysis at times, but it is an easy read with useful messages.
February 23, 2011
An illuminating report from a beat reporter whose beat is Ethiopian famine. I benefited from Gill's knowledge of the peoples, politicians, and geography of Ethiopia, and his dogged attempts to be fair to almost all sides. I say "almost" because he offered neither wisdom nor fairness toward anything American, governmental or otherwise, and because he obviously had his pet charities (whose rivals had little or no room to respond). Moreover, what hooked me into buying this book was the chance of a follow-up on the whole global charity phenomenon that surged in the 1980s: what did it leave behind? Is it still active in Ethiopia? Can I look inside its 21st-century progeny? How did it change (or not) westerners' desire to help the hungry, how did it spawn compassion fatigue, did it eventually shake off charity dilettantism or is that plague still with us?
Gill has a fine sense of irony, so it was disappointing to spot the places where he didn't employ it. As in his efforts to parse the Meles government and its progress toward feeding people, reforms and techniques and strategies and so on, without once confronting the question of whether this is a land that could EVER feed itself, and if not, what the clear-eyed response should be. Maybe a country that endlessly perfects its ways of collecting and channeling aid from better-fed countries is not actually solving its problem. What could Ethiopia do, anyway, to bear itself up in a globalized world? Should we make a fetish of these scrawny, unreliable, tiny farms and their inevitable seasonal failures, or does Ethiopia need an injection of something entirely different that could pull it into the world economy? Is Ethiopian subsistence -- spotty subsistence -- enough for us all to feel smug and happy about what we've helped bring about there? Wouldn't we want more for ourselves?
Moreover, Gill gets contraception backward: it's not an investment used to cut down the number of hungry mouths (western reductionism) but a technique that people will adopt AFTER their livelihoods become more secure. That's been shown. Family planning is the cart, prosperity the horse. "Feed the World" still echoes in my head from that dreck 1980s ballad. "Feed Ethiopia's future, and thus its prosperity, and thus its people" is presumably not as much of a hook.
Interesting to watch the news today. If Egypt can shake off a failed past, if Egyptians can demand more than what their "managers" have let them have, could Ethiopians? Speaking of ancient civilizations that presumably want more than an eternity of handouts . . .
Gill has a fine sense of irony, so it was disappointing to spot the places where he didn't employ it. As in his efforts to parse the Meles government and its progress toward feeding people, reforms and techniques and strategies and so on, without once confronting the question of whether this is a land that could EVER feed itself, and if not, what the clear-eyed response should be. Maybe a country that endlessly perfects its ways of collecting and channeling aid from better-fed countries is not actually solving its problem. What could Ethiopia do, anyway, to bear itself up in a globalized world? Should we make a fetish of these scrawny, unreliable, tiny farms and their inevitable seasonal failures, or does Ethiopia need an injection of something entirely different that could pull it into the world economy? Is Ethiopian subsistence -- spotty subsistence -- enough for us all to feel smug and happy about what we've helped bring about there? Wouldn't we want more for ourselves?
Moreover, Gill gets contraception backward: it's not an investment used to cut down the number of hungry mouths (western reductionism) but a technique that people will adopt AFTER their livelihoods become more secure. That's been shown. Family planning is the cart, prosperity the horse. "Feed the World" still echoes in my head from that dreck 1980s ballad. "Feed Ethiopia's future, and thus its prosperity, and thus its people" is presumably not as much of a hook.
Interesting to watch the news today. If Egypt can shake off a failed past, if Egyptians can demand more than what their "managers" have let them have, could Ethiopians? Speaking of ancient civilizations that presumably want more than an eternity of handouts . . .
July 24, 2011
Based on a journalist's experience and account of the current state in Ethiopia since the 1984 famine that brought global attention, triggering initiatives like Band Aid, Live Aid and USA for Africa, it covers the work and stance of various internal and external organisations highlighting the push for developmental aid as opposed to relief aid, conditional aid requiring market reforms and "proper" governance structure, how charitable organisations appear to exagerate situations to ensure its viability, China's questionable involvement in infrastructure development and concerns around the perceived autocratic government led by Meles Zenawi. With the recent famine crisis in 2008, it certainly creates a new sense of appreciation for what goes on when providing aid, in term of the continuing challenges, impacts, expected or unexpected outcomes, a result of a simple act of giving which is pivotal and yet so minute, effort wise. Not highly critical but it is a fairly easy read.
August 2, 2015
Through its journalistic approach, this book provides tremendous insight into the historical complexities of foreign aid to Ethiopia and the Ethiopian government's efforts to eradicate poverty. Peter Gill has a point of view, but his interviews with Meles and other Ethiopian officials, leaders of development and humanitarian organizations, and rural Ethiopians allowed me to see past and present controversies from multiple perspectives. Gill offers no simple solutions, but any foreigner wishing to "help" Ethiopia would benefit from reading this account.
March 26, 2016
A great insight into the dynamics of humanitarian assistance. Foreign government agendas, International organisation philosophies, local government aspirations, indigenous organisations visions, and the peoples plight...an intricate balance of affairs in saving humanity.
October 18, 2013
an erudite' informative and ultimately enjoyable read.
Displaying 1 - 8 of 8 reviews