| Imi, Ethiopia: (above) A mother stands over the body of her four-year-old son,
who has died two hours earlier. The last food distribution she received
was almost a month before, consisting of 4.5 kg of food that lasted three
days.
(Bottom) The funeral of five-year-old Abdi Hussein, the sixth
child out of eight in his family to die from the drought |
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Together we have allowed the conventions of entertainment increasingly to
set the rules for news stories: We need sympathetic characters, good
guys and bad guys, heroic choices, dramatic tension and —
all-important — resolution. But there are no easily identifiable bad
guys in this story, and celebrity benefit concerts don't always save the
world.
Charity can help keep these people alive. For now. But while famine is
often sparked by droughts or floods, it is primarily an economic
condition: There's plenty of food on our planet to feed the people in
these pictures, but they don't have the money to buy it.
In newspapers, on TV or even on this very page, an image like the one
above is usually framed by advertisements urging us — a nation
whose average citizen consumes 30 times as much as his or her Indian
counterpart — to buy even more. Does this affect the way we make
sense of the image?
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