The 1984-85 Ethiopian Famine

Podcast Transcript

In the 1980s, images of starving children in Ethiopia shocked the world and triggered one of the largest humanitarian responses in history.

But behind the famine was a much deeper story of drought, civil war, dictatorship, forced resettlement, and the politics of food.

It was a disaster that changed Ethiopia, transformed global charity, and raised hard questions about how relief can save lives while becoming entangled in conflict.

Learn more about the 1984-85 Ethiopian Famine on this episode of Everything Everywhere Daily.

If you were around in the 1980s, you probably remember the images from Ethiopia of the great famine that devastated the country. In response, some of the world’s greatest celebrity benefit events were held, raising millions of dollars in aid.

However, the story that was told about the famine was very simplistic. It was framed as a natural disaster caused by drought.

There was a drought, and the drought did play a big role in the famine, but the story behind it was much more complicated than was told at the time. Likewise, many of the highly publicized relief efforts were not nearly as impactful as many people assumed.

The story of the famine actually begins in the early 1970s.

Ethiopia had been ruled for decades by Emperor Haile Selassie, who was both a modernizer and an autocrat. His government tried to centralize power, build a modern state, and maintain Ethiopia’s independence and prestige, but the country remained deeply unequal.

Land ownership was concentrated in the hands of nobles, the church, and regional elites. Most Ethiopians were poor peasants, often paying rent or tribute to landlords. The state was weak in rural areas, but oppressive when it needed taxes, soldiers, or obedience.

Ethiopia had already suffered a major famine in the early 1970s, especially in the Wollo and Tigray regions. The famine of 1972 to 1974 exposed the weakness of Haile Selassie’s regime. Tens of thousands died while the imperial government was slow to respond and, in some cases, tried to conceal the crisis to protect its image.

This discredited the emperor at exactly the moment when Ethiopia was facing rising inflation, student protests, military dissatisfaction, labor unrest, and demands for land reform.

In 1974, a committee of military officers known as the Derg, meaning “committee” or “council” in Amharic, gradually took power. At first, the revolution did not have a single clear leader. It was a collection of junior and mid-level officers who claimed to be acting on behalf of the people against corruption, feudalism, and imperial misrule.

Haile Selassie was deposed in September 1974 and later died in custody, almost certainly under suspicious circumstances.

The Derg soon moved sharply towards the Soviets and a Soviet-style government. It declared Ethiopia a socialist state and nationalized land and major industries.

The most important figure to emerge was Mengistu Haile Mariam, who consolidated power through purges, executions, and political terror. By the late 1970s, Mengistu had become Ethiopia’s dominant ruler.

The Derg did enact one briefly popular policy: land reform. In theory, this ended the old landlord system and gave land to those who worked it.

However, peasants did not get to own the land that they worked. Instead, Mengistu took a page from the Joseph Stalin playbook and organized farmers through peasant associations, quotas, state procurement systems, and political surveillance. Over time, the government’s control over agricultural production became a factor that worsened food insecurity.

The Derg also inherited and intensified Ethiopia’s internal ethnic conflicts. Ethiopia was not a simple, unified nation-state. It was a multiethnic empire-like state with deep regional tensions.

Eritrea had been federated with Ethiopia after World War II and then annexed by Haile Selassie in 1962, sparking an independence struggle. By the 1970s and 1980s, Eritrean guerrillas were fighting a major war against the Ethiopian state.

Other insurgencies also emerged. In Tigray, the northernmost province of Ethiopia, the Tigray People’s Liberation Front, or TPLF, began fighting the Derg. In Oromo areas, the Oromo Liberation Front challenged centralalized rule

There were also rebellions in the Afar region and other regional conflicts. These movements were not all identical, but many shared opposition to centralization, military rule, and the Derg’s Marxist dictatorship.

The Derg’s early years were marked by extraordinary violence. During the Red Terror of the late 1970s, the regime targeted suspected opponents, especially students, leftist rivals, and urban activists.

Thousands, probably tens of thousands, were killed. Bodies were left in the streets as warnings. The Red Terror helped Mengistu eliminate rivals, but it also destroyed much of Ethiopia’s educated civilian political class and deepened the regime’s dependence on coercion.

At the same time, Ethiopia fought the Ogaden War against Somalia from 1977 to 1978. Somalia invaded the Ogaden region, which was inhabited largely by ethnic Somalis. Ethiopia initially struggled, but massive Soviet and Cuban support helped the Derg defeat Somalia. This victory strengthened Mengistu’s regime and locked Ethiopia firmly into the Soviet bloc. It also militarized the state even further.

By the early 1980s, Ethiopia was one of the most heavily militarized poor countries in the world. Large portions of state resources went to the army, and military campaigns devastated northern Ethiopia.

The famine was largely concentrated in northern Ethiopia, particularly in the Tigray and Wollo regions, though other regions were also affected to a lesser extent.

These areas were already teetering on the edge of disaster. Rainfall was unreliable, soils were degraded in many places, population pressure was high, and rural households had few food reserves.

But vulnerability is not the same as famine. Famines happen when stress overwhelms coping systems, and in Ethiopia, those systems were being destroyed by war and government policy.

Drought struck in the early 1980s, with particularly severe dry periods in 1983 and 1984. Crop production fell sharply, livestock died, grain prices rose, and peasants sold animals, tools, and household goods to buy food. Once those assets were gone, families had no buffer left. People began migrating in search of food, work, or relief.

The problem was that this was happening in a war zone. In Tigray and Eritrea, the government viewed many rural communities as politically suspect because guerrilla movements operated among them.

The Derg’s counterinsurgency strategy often treated civilians as part of the enemy’s support system. Villages were attacked, crops were burned, livestock was seized, markets were disrupted, and movement was restricted. The army’s campaigns made it harder for farmers to plant, harvest, trade, or flee.

Another major factor was the Derg’s agricultural policy. The regime imposed grain quotas and purchased grain at fixed prices. Peasants were often required to sell grain to the state at below-market prices, reducing incentives to produce grain surpluses and weakening local markets.

The government also emphasized collectivization and villagization, trying to reorganize peasants into planned villages and collective structures. These policies were ideologically driven and often coercive. They disrupted rural life and made farmers less able to respond flexibly to crisis.

The most notorious policy associated with the famine was resettlement. Beginning in earnest during the famine, the Derg moved hundreds of thousands of people from drought-stricken northern areas to supposedly more fertile regions in the south and southwest. In principle, resettlement could have been a rational response to environmental stress.

In practice, it was often brutal. People were moved against their will, families were separated, disease spread, and areas receiving the migrants were poorly prepared. Many died during transport or after arrival. The policy also served counterinsurgency goals: removing populations from rebel-influenced areas weakened the social base of insurgent movements.

Villagization was another disruptive policy. The government pushed peasants into concentrated villages, claiming this would make services easier to provide and agricultural modernization easier to manage.

Relocation often placed farmers farther from their fields.. Like resettlement, villagization blurred the line between development policy and political control.

While the Derg did not create the drought, it helped turn drought into a catastrophe. Its wars wrecked production and trade. Its counterinsurgency campaigns targeted the rural population. Its control over food and movement prevented people from using traditional survival strategies. Its ideological agricultural policies weakened markets and food production.

The outside world was slow to respond. Ethiopia’s government did not initially welcome full exposure of the crisis. The regime was preparing to celebrate the tenth anniversary of the revolution in 1984 and did not want famine to overshadow its image.

International agencies had some knowledge of the growing disaster, but the crisis did not become a major Western public issue until television images reached a mass audience.

The turning point came in October 1984, when BBC journalist Michael Buerk reported from Korem in northern Ethiopia. His report showed starving children, overwhelmed feeding camps, and mass death.

The footage shocked viewers in Britain and then around the world. Buerk described the scene in language that became famous, and the report helped transform Ethiopia from a distant crisis into a moral emergency in the West.

The public response was enormous. Irish musician Bob Geldof, moved by the BBC broadcast, helped organize Band Aid, a charity supergroup that recorded “Do They Know It’s Christmas?” in late 1984. The song sold in massive numbers and raised millions for famine relief.

In the United States, a similar effort produced “We Are the World” by USA for Africa in 1985. The largest event was Live Aid, held on July 13, 1985, with concerts in London and Philadelphia broadcast globally. It became one of the most famous charity events in history.

These efforts raised huge sums of money and changed public awareness. For many people in the West, the Ethiopian famine was their first direct encounter with a global humanitarian crisis through real-time mass media.

The relief effort did save lives. Food aid, emergency feeding centers, medical treatment, and cross-border relief reduced mortality in many places.

Without the Western response, the death toll would almost certainly have been higher. The media-driven outpouring also pressured governments to act faster and more visibly than they otherwise might have.

However, the relief effort had serious limits and complications. Much of the aid had to pass through the Ethiopian government, which was itself a cause of the famine. The Derg controlled ports, transport, distribution networks, and access permissions.

Aid agencies faced a harsh dilemma: cooperate with the regime and reach some starving people, or refuse cooperation and risk reaching almost no one in government-held areas.

The Western public often understood the famine as a simple tragedy of hunger in Africa. That framing was emotionally powerful, but incomplete and sometimes misleading.

Much of the public messaging emphasized drought, poverty, and helpless victims while saying less about dictatorship, forced relocation, and civil war.

This made fundraising easier, but it also flattened the political reality. It encouraged the idea that famine was primarily a natural African disaster rather than a man-made crisis shaped by specific decisions.

The Derg survived the famine, but it was weakened by the continuing war. Through the late 1980s, the regime remained dependent on Soviet support. When the Soviet Union began reducing foreign commitments under Mikhail Gorbachev, Mengistu’s position deteriorated.

In 1991, Mengistu fled Ethiopia, the Derg collapsed, and a new government took power in Addis Ababa, and Eritrea became independent in 1993. As of the recording of this episode, he still lives in exile in Zimbabwe at the age of 89.

The famine’s death toll remains debated. Estimates vary widely, often ranging from several hundred thousand to around one million deaths. Exact numbers are difficult to determine because the famine occurred during war, under government censorship, and weak recordkeeping. What is certain is that the disaster was immense and that many deaths were avoidable.

The Ethiopian famine of the 1980s was a human tragedy caused by far more than a lack of rain. The drought was the event that pushed things into disaster, but civil war, dictatorship, forced resettlement, and failed agricultural policies made everything far, far worse.