Reporting Famine

Abstract Drawing on her experience covering famine and conflicts in Yemen and South Sudan, author and journalist, Jane Ferguson, details the immense challenges and need for investigative journalism. The causes of hunger must be investigated by a wide variety of leading news organizations so the public can be made aware when famine victims are in fact the victims of war. Otherwise, there is a very real risk of successful attempts by combatants and governments to manipulate the news by making it unclear to both journalists reporting from afar and their viewers and readers why certain famines are happening. In South Sudan, for example, few news organizations sent their own reporters to the country to report on the famine in 2017, instead taking updates on the famine from aid agencies that were avoiding discussion of its causes (attacks on ethnic communities by government troops) for fear of being thrown out of the country by the government. When the author arrived in South Sudan to report, senior NGO officials told her they could not call this famine man-made because it would risk their entire operation, but that it was indeed caused by the governments brutal counter-insurgency tactics. In Yemen, there has been a more concerted effort by the Saudi-led coalition to prevent journalists from reporting on the famine, aware that its cause is a direct result of the tactics being used in the war.