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Ethiopia: Famine, Food Production, and Changes in the Legal Order

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  23 May 2014

Peter Koehn
Peter Koehn*
Affiliation:
University of Montana
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Extract

In 1970, drought and famine began to afflict Ethiopia (Shepherd, 1975: ix; U.S.Depart. of State, 1974: 41; Wiseburg, 1975: 299). By 1974, almost 8 percent of Ethiopia's people had experienced starvation (Shepherd, 1975: 39) and more than two hundred thousand Ethiopians had perished in the famine's wake. The famine captured an exceptionally high level of public and media attention throughout the world. Considerable public concern arose within Ethiopia and abroad over the vast dimensions of human suffering involved and in reaction to the government's callous attempt to conceal rather than alleviate the consequences of the disaster. Eventually, the famine and unmasking of the moral bankruptcy of the government's response to it became important precipitating factors in the deposition of Emperor Haile Selassie I and termination of monarchical rule by military coup d'etat in 1974.

The central purposes of this article are to show how the pre-coup legal order created conditions which left Ethiopian peasants vulnerable to famine, to describe pertinent changes in the legal order introduced by the Provisional Military Administrative Council (PMAC), and to explore the short- and long-term impact of such changes on food production and famine prospects in Ethiopia.

Type
Research Article
Information
African Studies Review , Volume 22 , Issue 1 , April 1979 , pp. 51 - 71
Copyright
Copyright © African Studies Association 1979

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