This heart-wrenching TV report from the CBC’s Brian Stewart inspired aid projects around the world to assist the famine that swept through Ethiopia in 1984-1985. A combination of a less-than-average rainfall in 1984 and the governments counterinsurgency in the north between the Tigrayan People’s Liberation Front and in the south with the Oromo Liberation Front left more than a one million dead, with a total of eight million victims. The media played a key role in increasing global awareness of the famine, mobilizing the people of the world to react.

httpv://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tFPr-zAXNuc

Brian Stewart writes about his experience covering the Ethiopian Famine of 1984-85, the first western journlaist to do so. Click here for the story “Indepth: Ethiopia, Covering the Story” (CBC News Online | December 14, 2004)