The struggle against starvation, violence and disease is also the struggle to understand and describe the world.

Media
consumers become interested in events in the Third World when they are
provided context by journalists who examine issues like climate change,
foreign intervention and economic trends [AFP]

Reports of famine vary wildly in their impact. Sometimes images of
emaciated children in relief camps provoke an outpouring of charitable
giving. The music and entertainment industry rally round as concerts are
organised and television specials are aired. But usually the response
is more muted. Other stories push famine off the agenda. The fact of
avoidable death on a vast scale fades into the background, where it
becomes part of a more general anxiety felt by citizens of rich
countries. We can see the need for action but, apart from making a
charitable donation, we don’t know what to do. In our more shameful
moments we tell ourselves that famine is natural, something that happens
over there, an immemorial misfortune. There are too many people, the
food is bound to run out sometimes. It is nature. If it is somebody’s
fault, it is the fault of the people there, of feckless peasants or
corrupt elites.

And so we veer between humanitarian zeal and uneasy or callous
indifference. Journalists in the midst of a catastrophe know they are
competing with domestic stories, not to mention the attention grabbing
wiles of the celebrity industry. They do all they can to bring home the
scale of human suffering. The result is often a kind of terrible
sublime. Individuals are presented as being caught in events beyond
human comprehension and outside history. In his 1984 broadcast from
Korem in Ethiopia, Michael Buerk talked of "a biblical famine, now, in
the twentieth century". Then, famously, his reporting helped inspire
Band Aid. All too often, similar journalism fails to connect with an
audience that has become used to famine as a collection of heart-rending
images and phrases. Faced with something so awful we are tempted to
turn away.

There are ways of talking about famine that don't rely so heavily on
emotional appeals and that instead relate the immediacy of human
suffering to political and economic structures. News professionals are
apt to insist that they have to focus on the emotive and the dramatic if
they are to stand any chance of engaging their audiences. But, as Tom
Mills of the New Left Project notes, there are grounds for thinking that the professionals have this one wrong. In 2002 Greg Philo summarised three major studies by the Glasgow Media Group that explored UK media coverage and public understanding of the developing world.

Providing context

Philo noted "a widespread belief in broadcasting that audiences are
not interested in factual programming about the developing world". But
though this view was widespread, there was little to support it. The
Glasgow Media Group's studies showed that audiences became much more
engaged in stories about conflict in the Third World once they were able
to situate what was happening in a broader explanatory context. As long
as foreign news stories were presented as a series of disasters far
away that had no connection with events at home, people's interest was
weak. Not only that, Philo's interviewees would often say that the
problems were down to the failure of people in poor countries to manage
their affairs competently. Once it was pointed out that Western diamond
and oil companies were helping to drive conflict in Angola, for example,
people became much more engaged. The problems of ordinary people far
away became more, not less, interesting as viewers were offered a
structural account. Conflict is inexplicable without reference to
resources and to the unaccountable financial infrastructure used to hide
the spoils. Without an explanation that makes sense audiences will, not
unreasonably, look elsewhere.

Like conflicts, famines are not inevitable and they do not happen in
isolation from the rest of the world. A drought is a natural event. Mmind
starvation is not. It is political, insofar as it is the consequence of
human decision-making. Under British rule millions of Indians starved
to death as a result of food shortages. These famines, the British were
sure, could not be avoided. They insisted they were the fault of the
lazy and too numerous natives. Since independence the country has
prevented famine from returning. Political will, not food, was the
crucial thing missing in British India.

The BBC’s Andrew Harding reports that
the current famine in Somalia is taking place in the midst of a
longstanding conflict. Al-Shabab, a collection of Islamist groups, rules
much of the country while the official government controls only part of
the capital city. Though much of the region has experienced drought,
the impact on human life has been far greater in Somalia. And the
confrontation between various armed groups in Somalia is itself part of a
struggle for resources and control throughout the Horn of Africa, in
which America and other powers are deeply involved. Adequate coverage of
the famine in Somalia, and the pattern of action and inaction that made
it possible, must take into account the dynamics of this foreign
intervention. And that in turn requires that journalists look steadily
at the crackpot logic of the War on Terror.

Climate change and economics

There are other frames of reference, rarely noted in reporting on
famines. Climate change is bringing more, and more intense, droughts to
East Africa. Climate change is something for which the rich world is
largely responsible. Images of suffering do nothing to help us make the
connections between our lifestyles and a deepening environmental crisis.
Indeed, they leave us free to blame the victims of our own appetite for
cheap energy. Coverage that adequately explained famine abroad would
prompt a debate about economic reform at home.

Furthermore, both acute food scarcity and chronic poor nutrition are
both intimately linked to the structure of the global food market. The
global institutions, the World Bank, the World Trade Organisation and
the International Monetary Fund in particular, have encouraged
developing countries to remove subsidies and tariffs on food. In
countries like Korea, subsidies encouraged economic growth by increasing
the buying power of farmers. Protected by tariffs, urban industries
sold to this rural market and were able to grow until they were ready to
compete internationally. By contrast, in much of Africa and Latin
America cheap imports have driven farmers off the land and into the
cities. People who could be growing food are instead living in slums,
with little hope of finding well-paid work. The world’s poorest
countries are then forced to buy food in global markets at prices that
fluctuate wildly.

The current famine is not something happening far away. It is an
event in our shared history. The course of events in East Africa will be
determined in part by decisions made thousands of miles away in the
ministries of the rich world and the agencies of the global
institutions. These decisions in turn will reflect the knowledge and
determination of citizens to see the present crisis addressed and its
sequels prevented. But public indifference will only be dispelled when
the media begin to explain, carefully and accurately, how and why famine
and conflict break out.

Though broadcasters and journalists may feel more comfortable
offering emotionally accessible stories about individual suffering, the
evidence suggests that clear structural explanations are more likely to
engage audiences. Those of us who work in the media have a duty to act
on this evidence and to trace a structure of economic and political
power that is also a structure of moral responsibility.

To put it another way, the struggle against starvation, violence and
disease is also the struggle to understand and describe the world.

Dan Hind has worked in publishing since 1998 and is the author of two acclaimed books.

Follow him on Twitter: @danhind

The views expressed in this article are the author's own and do not necessarily represent Al Jazeera's editorial policy.