Dawit Wolde Giorgis, commissioner of Ethiopia's Relief and Rehabilitation Commission, spent the better part of three years trying to get someone to listen. By August 1983, he was, in his own words, "shouting his lungs out," warning that millions were at risk and hundreds dying daily. The data behind him was solid. The RRC had been flagging drought and crop failure since 1981, when it presented evidence to the United Nations showing persistent rain failures spreading across the northern highlands. By 1982, Western development agencies had confirmed the assessment. By early 1983, destitute farmers were appearing at feeding centers.
The early warning system had worked. And then nothing happened.
You have to understand one political lesson the Derg regime had absorbed completely. In 1974, footage of Emperor Haile Selassie's opulence juxtaposed against images of starving peasants had helped bring down the monarchy. The military junta that replaced him drew a specific conclusion: the story of hunger was more dangerous than the hunger itself.
So when the RRC's data threatened to become a story, the regime suppressed it. Through the spring and summer of 1984, the Ethiopian government suppressed news of the famine. In August and September, it banned foreign journalists from traveling outside Addis Ababa entirely. The reason was documented: the regime was preparing lavish celebrations for the tenth anniversary of the revolution and the launch of the Workers' Party of Ethiopia. Dawit, the man whose job was to sound the alarm, watched the preparations while his reports went unacknowledged. The government did not formally recognize the famine's existence until October 3, after the festivities had passed.
And it went deeper. The hardest-hit regions, Tigray and Wollo, were also centers of armed insurgency. The regime's Agricultural Marketing Corporation continued extracting grain from drought-affected areas at artificially low prices to feed the cities. Citizens in Wollo, already starving, were required to pay a "famine relief tax" until 1984. When the regime launched its resettlement program in late 1984, it moved 800,000 people from the northern highlands to the southwest. Human Rights Watch estimated at least 50,000 died in the relocations. The famine was unaddressed and then it was leveraged.
The complicity ran well beyond Addis Ababa. The FAO repeatedly slashed Ethiopia's requests for help between 1981 and 1984. The World Food Programme estimated, wrongly, that Ethiopian ports could handle only 125,000 metric tons of relief, then took what the academic record calls "the shameful step" of estimating actual need at 125,000 metric tons. Perhaps one-tenth of the real figure. The system had calculated how many people could be saved based on how many bags of grain could be unloaded at a dock, then declared that the number of people who needed saving was, conveniently, the same. Western governments, hostile to Mengistu's Soviet-aligned regime, treated the RRC's warnings with Cold War suspicion. The information sat on desks in multiple capitals. Nobody acted.
On October 19, 1984, a four-man crew including BBC correspondent Michael Buerk and Kenyan cameraman Mohamed Amin flew into Mekele. Their visas had been withdrawn and then, after argument and luck, reissued. For three days they shuttled in a small twin-engine plane between the capital and the northern towns of Mekele, Korem, and Alamata.
On October 23, the BBC aired what Buerk had found. His camera opened on the plain outside Korem at dawn, the light breaking over what he called "a biblical famine, now, in the 20th century." The report led both the lunchtime and evening bulletins, running six minutes or longer. Within days, 425 television networks had broadcast the footage to 470 million people. It was, as the BBC's John Simpson recalled, a slow news day.
The information blockade broke because pictures reached 470 million living rooms and were too visceral for the political calculus to contain. The images went everywhere. Estimates of the dead range from 400,000 to over a million, depending on scope and period. The range itself tells you how carefully anyone was counting.
Dawit, who eventually defected to the United States, said later:
"They didn't need a BBC correspondent to come and give a twenty-three-minute documentary. They didn't need that. They had all the information."
That sentence should be carved somewhere permanent.
In the proposed FY2027 U.S. federal budget, NOAA's funding has been slated for elimination. The agency operates the satellites, maintains the ocean monitoring buoys, and produces the climate data that feeds every early warning system in the Western Hemisphere. Warming is accelerating. The instruments confirm it. The early warning system, for the moment, still works. But the people who learned the Derg's lesson and improved on it have found a cleaner method. They are eliminating the instruments. The next Dawit will have nothing left to shout about.