The African famine story broke for the American public during the week of October 23, 1984, when NBC-TV aired BBC films of an Ethiopian relief camp. In the year since then, the newspapers and the broadcast media have imprinted our minds with images of dried earth, spectral babies, and good-hearted rock singers. The hows and whys have, as usual, largely been left to the periodical press, and there the picture has been, if not superficial, curiously skewed.

Most of the major weeklies and monthlies ran one important article on the famine. The January 21 issue of the New Republic had three, of which two dealt with the context. Allan Hoben’s "The Origins of Famine" pointed to the ancient farming techniques in the north of Ethiopia that have exhausted the soil; the long-standing wars in Eritrea and Tigre; and drastic land reform by the Mengistu regime. "The government’s goal is to generate most agricultural production from collectives," wrote Hoben, but productivity "has been low, and they have been unpopular with most peasants." While mentioning that the famine was "no surprise" and "for political reasons both inside and outside Ethiopa not addressed until it reached catastrophic proportions," Hoben left no doubt about the main cause: "If Mengistu continues to pursue his current agricultural policies, the pattern of drought and famine will continue."

Turning the page, you found Robert D. Kaplan contradicting Hoben’s claim that "the international famine relief efforts have apparently not been directly exploited for political purposes by the Mengistu government." Kaplan reported that they had been in the worst way: that "since the Western relief effort began, the bombing of civilian targets in Tigre and Eritrea have [sic] measurably increased, and it is becoming clear that the one is a direct cause of the other. . . . By using Western-donated grain to pay his army, Mengistu has more cash to allocate for costly air raids." He concluded by urging Washington to send relief money directly to the guerrilla groups: "Doubtless they would siphon off some of it to buy arms, but at least it might provide the West with a little more leverage over Mengistu." In short, do as Mengistu does: use food as a weapon. And although he didn’t say it bluntly (for this would mean acknowledging that we must support either war or starvation), Kaplan implied that to stop Mengistu’s misuse of the grain we should stop the flood of aid: "[These refugees] might never have been atttacked had the West continued to follow its tough but sensible course in dealing with the Ethiopian regime."

That course – the administration’s policy before the public outcry in October – was to "withhold food aid for two years from Ethiopia in an effort to topple the Marxist government." This charge, quoted from the Reverend Charles Elliot of Christian Aid, was briefly discussed last November, then forgotten; afterwards you had to hunt for any implication of the West’s involvement, political or economic, in the famine. Hoben’s and Kaplan’s articles both put the blame on internal factors: soil depletion, civil war, agrarian reform, air raids, graft. Nick Eberstadt in the March Commentary, the newsweekly cover stories, the rare background articles in the New York Times and the Wall Street Journal – all found the causes in African politics, African economics, African blunders. The Western countries were concerned bystanders, sending billions but frustrated in the results. This line, nearly unaminous, could hardly fail to win public acceptance.

The one major writer to present another side to the story was Jack Shepherd. In a long article in the April Atlantic he told a story of acquired dependence on Western food, rapid and ill-advised industrialization, and lavish Western-sponsored projects. To get rid of its food surplus, the West sold grain to Africa and discouraged local production. To pay off huge debts to the World Bank, African countries continued to put more into copper and cocoa than millet and maize. The results of Western development aid had, he said, "been dismal." Worse, "funding for Africa’s long-term development is being cut back. . . [and] moreover, it is shifting from an aid policy based on need to one based on internal African politics, free-market ideology, and U.S. strategic and security interests. . . . This year more than half of all U.S. economic aid to Africa will go to just five nations."

In the March-April and May-June Africa Reports, Shepherd said the same thing more pointedly. Though the Mengistu government – unlike Haile Selassie’s twelve years ago – warned of famine from 1978 on, repeatedly "the Reagan administration turned its back." Simply: we tried to starve Ethiopia out of the Soviet camp. Few people could tell you that AID requested no food aid for Ethiopia in Fiscal 1984, or that the administration’s April budget called for a sixty per cent increase in military aid to Africa and just a 1.3 per cent increase in development aid. Neither is unrelated to the crisis in Africa.

While it is nonsense to blame the West for all of Africa’s woes, as some African nations have done, the truth is uncomfortable enough. How much easier to focus on the folly of African behavior than to question our own trade, finance, and military policies. Rather than pointing out that our interests conflict with the Africans’ and have worsened a bad situation, the American media have given the genral impression that our only presence in Africa is sacks of grain marked "Gift of the People of the U.S.A."

Foreign coverage of the famine has been more sophisticated. Their television crews stayed in for weeks, not days; not surprisingly, our best views of the Ethiopian and Sudanese camps came from the BBC and the Canadian Broadcasting Corproation. Articles in the British, French, and Italian papers have explored the causes, both internal and external. A recent piece in Milan’s Corriere della Sera, for example, described the rebellion in southern Chad, the use of food as a weapon on both sides, the role of debt and cotton overproduction in the politics of famine, and the importance of uranium deposits in the West’s support of President Habre, all of which would be news to American readers.

In the absence of the historical ties which make a large place for Africa in European consciousness, American newspapers and television networks maintain only a few African bureaus, in the wealthiest capitals, often far from the important stories. Bad roads and remoteness make access to sources difficult; nowhere are opposition viewpoints harder to dig up. As Dan Connell, a former reporter in East Africa, wrote in a 1982 article in Africa Today, "These factors combine to encourage the reporter – regardless of his personal intentions – to depend heavily on briefings by local officials and foreign diplomats. . . . The result is a vicious circle in which policy forms the basis for news coverage and news coverage spawns policy."

The situation is more unfair to Africans and the American public; it is dangerous. As our influence in Africa has increased over the past few years, our knowledge, except of South Africa, has not grown proprotionately. The government is thus left with a freer hand in its Africa policy than the public allows elsewhere. The famine is the most tragic consequence of this ignorance.