The Ethiopian famine.

It has been suggested that the Ethiopian famine is only one facet of a long-term climatic change whose effects include the southward movement of the Sahara. The impression is often given that famine is widespread across a belt of Africa from Cape Verde to the Red Sea, but nothing could be further from the truth. Famine is defined as an extreme shortage of food, but this must be viewed in relation to customary food intakes, which, although often low, are able to sustain an increasing population. Extreme starvation is certainly not typical of the Sahel, although it has occurred in localized areas in Mauritania, Mali, Niger and Chad. Equally untrue is the impression created by the media that there was widespread famine in Ethiopia. Indeed we shall present some information to indicate that food production for the country as a whole was not low at the critical time. Perhaps a more apt title for this paper would be the famine in Wollo, a province of about 2.5 million people, but not all of them were affected. It is customary to distinguish between chronic undernutrition and famine. The former is journalistically dull, and very little has been achieved to alleviate the problem. Political measures are required to deal with such sensitive areas as land tenure, the capital demands of rural development, the easy money to be made from an urban light industry surrounded by cheap labour, and general corruption in the cities of the developing world. Famine, on the other hand, attracts much publicity and creates an entrke for foreign agencies to work in areas previously prohibited or ignored, but action is limited to treating symptoms rather than causes. In fact, of course, famine is merely the ‘tip of an iceberg’ and indicates widespread chronic undernutrition. In so far as the distinction is necessary, it might be more profitable if the charities concerned in famine relief would concentrate on feeding hungry people rather than attempting to treat the nutritional deficiencies and endemic diseases that prevailed before the famine started. Sophisticated medical teams providing expensive pharmaceutical preparations, such as protein hydrolysates and vitamin pills, must be regarded as a dissipation of limited funds (Rivers, Seaman & Holt, 1974). It seems self-evident that the primary need of starving people is food. It is also clear that an evaluation of the effects of a famine should be on the basis of a comparison against what existed before, rather than against our own high European standards. In Ethiopia we were fortunate in having completed a nutritional study in a northern agricultural area over a 4-year period immediately before 1973, the year of the famine. We were aware of a moderate migration of people from the rural areas to the roadside towns and on to the capital cities, a characteristic that was