It was the scene of a news report that changed the way the world viewed Africa: 21 years on, Rob Crilly visits Korem in Ethiopia
Aymut Kashay’s God is an unforgiving God. When three consecutive rains failed and villagers spent two years living off their reserves of grain, he knew who was to blame. The villagers of Korem, in the Ethiopian highlands, had sinned and must pay the price.
"It was a scourge of God’s punishment. That was a moment of judgment," says the 80-year-old farmer, squatting in the dappled shade of a eucalyptus tree.
The moment of judgment cast the wattle-and-daub huts of Korem into one of the worst human disasters of the last millennium. Twenty-one years ago, Aymut, his relatives and neighbours – anyone who could still move – walked into the dusty town in search of deliverance.
"The rains had stopped, we ate what we had harvested and again the rains didn’t come," says Aymut. "The third time, there was nothing else we could do."
Government officials urged the starving millions in Ethiopia’s northern province of Tigray to begin assembling at feeding stations. Korem became a tented city of thousands.
"There was a shelter just here," says Aymut, pointing down the hillside to where fields of maize shine green in the afternoon sun. A freshly painted hotel stands ready for its grand opening.
Michael Buerk found only scorched earth and misery when he arrived with a BBC film crew in 1984. In a seven-and-a-half-minute broadcast, he would change the way the world viewed Africa, describing a "biblical famine, now, in the 20th century".
Some 40,000 emaciated children and desperate parents were crammed into Korem – a small village of tumbledown brick buildings and simple thatched huts, then as now. He and his team had found thousands of bodies on the hillsides around the village.
Bob Geldof was among those who sat transfixed by the images. "Doing nothing would mean you were complicit in murder," he later said. He mobilised the pop world into recording Do They Know It’s Christmas, which set records as the fastest-selling pop single, and went straight to number one.
The following year, Geldof assembled a stellar musical line-up for Live Aid, concerts in Wembley and Philadelphia which were broadcast to a global audience of one and a half billion. This month marks the 20th anniversary of the event.
Today, Geldof and pop music are doing their bit for Africa again, with a series of concerts designed to put pressure on the G8 leaders as they meet next week to discuss a series of antipoverty measures for the developing world.
People like Aymut will tell you why the concerts are necessary. Much of his time in the camp at Korem passed in a starvation-induced delirium. He woke up to find that his wife had died. "Day after day, hour after hour, it seemed that everyone was dying. I wasn’t even aware that she had died. I was so weak."
Some 20 years after Live Aid, the starving children are gone. Korem’s streets are filled with boys charging after a football or rolling hoops and girls fetching water. This year’s rains have been good and the fields are full. But the fear of hunger is never far away.
Aymut is too frail to work his small plot of teff, a local grain used to make a soft, staple bread known as injera. Instead he shares it with a younger farmer. By employing help he must share his harvest. The result is barely enough food to satisfy his modest needs. The people are talking about a return to famine.
"Now we are in a position that it might happen again and God will be angry again," says Aymut. The people of Ethiopia are hungry this year. The World Food Programme is helping almost a quarter of Tigray’s population of four million to survive.
In all, more than eight million people in Ethiopia need food aid this year. Even in a good year, five million people cannot feed themselves. It all leaves many commentators and economists wondering where the money has gone and challenging the role that aid has to play in Africa.
Getahun Tesfaye, of the Ethiopian Economic Policy Research Institute, says a billion dollars of aid each year has made little difference to rural farmers. "Things are getting worse, new areas are becoming vulnerable, and more people are in difficulties," he says. "Whatever aid there has been in the past, whatever development interventions have been made in the past, they haven’t been effective, they haven’t produced meaningful results.
All we have had is handouts for people, without changing lifestyles."
He says effort should be concentrated on developing the local organisations and infrastructure that can hold the Ethiopian government and international donors to account.
Instead, the country has gone backwards in many ways since Live Aid. Average income has fallen from $190 to $108, making it one of the poorest countries on the planet. Services and infrastructure are almost non-existent.
Ethiopia’s road network extends to only 50cm per man, woman and child. Those responsible for channelling aid into the country argue that a surging rural population, using farming methods that have not changed in centuries, means that a shrinking harvest has to be spread thinner.Ethiopia’s population has almost doubled since 1984, growing from about 40 million to 73 million.
Paulette Jones, of the World Food Programme (WFP), says: "The population is growing at more than 2 per cent every year on the same amount of land. That land is increasingly unproductive and shared between more people each year."
Some estimates suggest that food production has shrunk from 450kg per person to 140kg today.
"There are plenty of critics of food aid but a fifth of the people in this country would have died were it not for emergency food aid," claims Jones.
However, in recent years, the WFP has begun to put the emphasis on development projects. School feeding projects and food-for-work programmes have become widespread since Live Aid, but now the emphasis is on income generation. The latest incarnation has the unwieldy name, Managing Environmental Resources to Enable Transition to a More Sustainable Livelihood – or Meret, the Amharic word for land.
Instead of asking villagers to help build a road or an irrigation ditch in return for a few sacks of maize and soya flour, the new approach addresses the whole agricultural environment. Trees are being planted to prevent soil erosion, stone walls are being built to prevent water rushing down gulleys and gouging out huge chasms in scarce land.
Josephine Mahiga-Janabi, head of the WFP in Tigray, says Meret offers an exit strategy to aid agencies for the first time.
"We learn from our mistakes and we realise that the level of results will be more if we refocus on these kinds of activity," she says.
Two hours down the mountain road from Korem – past feeding stations where villagers pile sacks of emergency aid on to donkeys – sits the dusty town of Debub. Fikado Habtu is piling rocks on to a small wall to strengthen the gentle terraces that line the hills above the town.
"It has been very useful for our land," he says. "We have already seen our crop production increase."
Before, he was lucky to harvest three bags of teff on his quarter-hectare plot. This year, he says he can easily collect four.
In the town, bony cattle drink water from puddles around the main well. It used to be the only place for children to fill their assorted buckets, cans and inner tubes. They had to dangle their ropes 25m into the void.
Now the water has risen to four metres below ground level. More than 140 households have dug shallow wells beside their small plots. Green tomatoes hang from thick vines.
Other things have changed in Ethiopia too. The capital has a gleaming new airport and a booming flower industry exports blooms around the world.
The hated military regime of Mengistu Haile Miriam – blamed for hiding the 1984 famine from the eyes of the world – has gone, toppled by rebels who still hold power.
For its part the government has embarked on a $3.2 billion (¤2.65 billion) food security programme. This includes a "food safety net" designed as a rudimentary welfare state, offering food or cash in return for work on development projects. Those too sick, old or young to work are given food but excused from duty.
Some 60,000 technology experts are being trained at new agricultural colleges. They will fan out among the country’s isolated villages, disseminating the latest ideas to rural farmers. And, in a highly controversial move, the government is resettling hundreds of thousands of families from arid areas to more fertile zones.
"No one wants to live on handouts," says information minister Bereket Simon. "Anyone who has seen famine and starvation is committed to ridding the country of hunger. In a matter of two to three years we believe Ethiopia will say goodbye to food aid."
No one who sees the children begging at every junction in the country’s capital takes claims of self-sufficiency seriously. A steady of stream of children make their way to the capital, Addis Ababa, in search of food. Some hitch rides on buses or trucks from villages in drought-prone areas. Others walk for weeks on end.
And food is not just an issue in the countryside. Some, like 11-year-old Samson Shifrew, leave their city homes when their families cannot look after them. His mother died after divorcing his father, and little Samson and his sister went to live with their grandmother.
Everything worked well for a year, but then their grandmother fell ill.
After not eating for aweek, brother and sister decided on a radical course of action.
"My sister and I decided that she would stay but I would go out to find food," Samson says. "I do not regret leaving. I think I would not be here had I stayed. I would have died."
The idea that a child could starve to death at home might sound outlandish, but clearly it is possible in Ethiopia. Unicef, in its State of theWorld’s Children report, says that malnutrition is a factor in the deaths of more than 260,000 Ethiopian children each year.
The 10,000 street children who can be found begging at every road junction in Addis Ababa risk any number of food-borne illnesses. Samson explains how they would pick scraps from rubbish dumps. The freshest food would already have spent three days in a dustbin.
"At first I couldn’t eat leftover food," says Samson, in the matter-of-fact delivery of the young. "If I did, then I was sick. After a while I got used to it.
If we were very hungry, we wouldn’t pick the insects out – we would eat the whole thing. If we were not so hungry, we would remove the dirty parts."
He is one of the lucky ones. Today he lives in a shelter run by Irish charity Goal. He survived his two months on the street and may one day return to his grandmother if she is well enough to care for him and his sister.
The country may still face huge challenges in feeding its growing population, but aid workers, such as Lewis Temple, country director of Goal, say the "biblical famines" that Michael Buerk described may have become a thing of the past.
Two years ago, 13 million people faced starvation –more than during the 1984-5 famine – but the aid response worked, Temple says.
"There weren’t mass deaths," he continues.
"The response is operational. The government did acknowledge there was a problem and made a call for help internationally, which didn’t happen in 1984. But the underlying problems are still there and in some ways more serious."
For the people of Korem, it means relying on the compassion of their God. All the roadbuilding, well-digging and ploughing in the world will not save Aymut Kashay if his God does not send rain.
"We never tire of working for development activities, but whatever we do," he says, squinting into the sun, "we are still in God’s hands."