# Ethiopian Famine of 1983-1985 The famine the West remembers through [[Live Aid]], and the one the scholarship remembers as a counterinsurgency. It affected **Wollo, Tigray, Begemder, Eritrea, Gojjam and Hararghe**, spread to the southern highlands by early 1986, and at its height touched roughly **one-sixth of Ethiopia's population**. The rains did fail: the small rains of 1984 were scanty and the main rains failed altogether. What the rains do not explain is why the famine arrived where it did, when it did, and killed the people it killed. ## The death toll > [!warning] Estimates span a factor of four, and the highest one is the one most often repeated > | Figure | Source | Basis | > |---|---|---| > | **More than 300,000** | USAID | Lower-bound donor estimate | > | **A minimum of 400,000** | Africa Watch, *Evil Days* (1991) | Northern Ethiopia excess famine mortality; explicitly a floor | > | **400,000–500,000** | [[Alex de Waal]] | As above, with resettlement deaths counted separately | > | **~1 million** | UN | The round number in general circulation; de Waal called the UN's handling of it "remarkably cavalier" and said it had "absolutely no scientific basis whatsoever" | > | **1.2 million** | "insider estimates" in secondary literature | Upper bound, methodology unverifiable | > > Other figures: **400,000 refugees** left the country, **2.5 million** were internally displaced, roughly **200,000 children** were orphaned, and **7.75 million** people were affected. ## The argument that this was policy ***Evil Days: 30 Years of War and Famine in Ethiopia*** (Africa Watch / [[Human Rights Watch]], 1 September 1991), with [[Alex de Waal]] as principal investigator, is the load-bearing source. Its central finding, verbatim: > [!quote] Africa Watch, *Evil Days* > Something over half of this mortality can be attributed to human rights abuses causing the famine to come earlier, strike harder, and extend further. And: "the famine was not caused by war and drought, but by particular strategies which the government adopted to fight the war." Across the whole thirty years the report covers, it puts the toll at "a minimum of one million lives, and possibly as many as 1.5 million." **The mechanisms are specific and documented, which is what makes the argument hold.** ### Counterinsurgency in Tigray Three named strategies ran from 1980: large-scale offensives (the **Sixth**, August 1980–March 1981; the **Seventh**, February–April 1983; the **Eighth**, February–May 1985), aerial bombardment, and restrictions on movement and trade. - **Rural markets were bombed as a matter of policy** from 1980, intensifying in February 1982. **Medebai market was bombed over 100 times.** **Hausien market** likewise, until it was destroyed in 1988. **Chilla market, 3–5 March 1983: 315 killed or wounded.** Nine markets were bombed during the Seventh Offensive alone. - **Movement and trade were licensed.** A pass system required Peasant Association authorisation to travel; roadblocks sat at town entrances; army checkpoints extracted bribes; access to grain mills was restricted. A January 1984 crackdown detained several thousand people. - **The economic result is measurable.** Blocked trade routes meant grain surpluses of **8,000–10,000 tonnes in Raya** and **10,000–15,000 tonnes in Simien** could not reach deficit areas. Food existed. It could not move. ### National agricultural policy - The **Agricultural Marketing Corporation** bought grain from peasants at low fixed prices — such a disincentive that some farmers **bought grain on the open market in order to meet their AMC quota**. - **Grain wholesaling was made illegal** across much of the country; licensed grain dealers fell **from 20,000–30,000 to 4,942** in the decade after the revolution. - Peasants in Wollo paid a **famine relief tax** to the AMC **until 1984**. - A travel-permit system blocked petty trading and migrant labour; the collapse of the state farms cost an estimated **500,000 northern farmers** part of their income. - In 1984 Mengistu announced **46% of GNP** for military spending. The health budget fell from 6% of the total in 1973–74 to 3% by 1990–91. ## Resettlement and villagization **Resettlement** moved people from the insurgent north to the south. Gebru Tareke's count from Ethiopian government records is **594,190 moved in 1984–86** — 367,016 (62%) from Wollo, 108,241 (18%) from Shewa, 89,716 (15%) from Tigray — at a cost of **767 million birr (US$374 million)**, with **at least 84,000 (14%) fleeing the new settlements**. > [!warning] Resettlement deaths: three estimates, three methods > **~33,000 (5.5% of resettlers)** — Gebru Tareke, from government records. **At least 50,000** — Africa Watch. **At least 100,000 in 1985 alone** — Médecins Sans Frontières. **MSF publicly denounced the programme in October 1985** — the refusal to authorise a therapeutic feeding centre at Kelala, the diversion of international aid to fund forced population transfers, and the transfer conditions themselves: people crammed into planes and helicopters, overcrowded buses, deaths in transit. **MSF France was expelled from Ethiopia days later**, and its 1986 media campaign led the authorities to suspend transfers temporarily. **Villagization** began in 1985 and moved people into planned settlements: **~4.6 million into over 4,500 villages by March 1986**, around **13 million by 1989**, essentially abandoned in early 1990. Promised services did not arrive and production fell. ## The other side of the line The [[Tigray People's Liberation Front]] and its **Relief Society of Tigray (REST)** ran a cross-border relief operation from [[Sudan]] that the Derg treated as a military target. - Migration to Sudan: **~75,000 Tigrayans in 1983**, **~189,000 in 1984–85** — 5,000 in September 1984, 25,000 in October, 87,000 in December. **An estimated 10,000–15,000 died in the Sudanese camps** in 1984–85. - **REST moved 32,000 tonnes into Tigray during 1985**; the ICRC moved 8,400 tonnes the same year; by 1988 cross-border operations had carried over **150,000 tonnes**. - Relief itself was attacked: **27–30 March 1985**, nine REST transit and feeding centres bombed; December 1984, a refugee column hit near Shilalo (18 killed, 56 wounded); Abi Adi, February 1985, 25 dead and over 100 wounded; **Wukro, 8 April 1988, roughly 100 killed** and 14,000 people fled the town. ## Why it matters here > [!important] ⭐ Ask who benefits from a famine being narrated as weather > The Western memory of 1984 is a drought — an act of God that generous people responded to. The documentary record is a government that taxed famine victims for famine relief, made grain trading illegal, bombed the markets where food was sold, and moved 600,000 people out of the region where the insurgency was. **The "natural disaster" frame was not merely inaccurate; it was the frame that made it possible to route the response through the government causing the disaster.** [[Live Aid]] is where that goes next. > > The general form: when a catastrophe is described as having no author, the question of who to hold responsible does not get asked, and aid flows to whoever controls the territory. That is a mechanism, not a moral, and it recurs — in Sudan, in Yemen, in the [[Tigray War]] thirty-seven years later in the same province, where roughly 60% of the estimated deaths were from starvation. ## See also [[Ethiopian History Hub]] · [[Live Aid]] · [[Alex de Waal]] · [[Derg]] · [[Red Terror (Ethiopia)]] · [[Tigray People's Liberation Front]] · [[Tigray War]] · [[Human Rights Watch]]