The Dispatches from Disaster Zones conference, chaired by broadcaster Jonathan Dimbleby, will feature speeches from the Princess Royal, the European Commissioner for Humanitarian Affairs, Emma Bonino, and the UK International Development Secretary, Clare Short.

Don Redding wants better relations between the media and agencies

The London conference is the initiative of 10 leading relief agencies including Save the Children, Oxfam GB, British Red Cross, CAFOD and Christian Aid. They want to review the way aid agencies and the media report emergencies.

The conference will debate the way humanitarian disasters, such as Rwanda, Zaire and Sudan, are covered by the world's media.

It will look at how broadcasting has changed since Michael Burke's ground-breaking report on the Ethiopian famine in 1984, through an apparent explosion in emergencies in the early 1990s.

Don Redding and George Alagiah debate how the media were caught up in the Rwanda emergency

Don Redding, the co-ordinator of Dispatches from Disaster Zones, told BBC's Breakfast News: "Ten years ago 'people are suffering, send help' might have appeared to be have been enough, but I think we now know differently.

"I think we know that because in 1994 there was a genocide in Rwanda where a population the size of Birmingham was wiped out in a very organised and planned campaign of elimination and it was reported as an aid story.

"The people who organised it later fled with part of the population as refugees and they were reported as the victims and that is to me a serious episode of misreporting which we all need to review and to learn from."

In particular, the conference will focus on the effects of reporting on the communities in crisis as well as keeping the public better informed.

Media reports can be affected by manipulated information

International exposure of major emergencies briefly register on the public conscience, the conference will suggest.

But those images can have a lasting impact on hundreds of thousands of lives.

The wrong information can lead to food supplies being sent when medical supplies are needed or when the local harvest is due.

Mr Redding wants news organisations to steer clear from reporting issues such as a war, rebellion or political conflict simply as an aid story.

But when there is a need for help from the public then the disturbing images should be presented with as much information about the subject as possible, he said.

At the heart of the discussions will be new studies of the reporting of the Zaire rebellion in 1996-7 which suggest that both the media and aid agencies were manipulated by information controlled at political and military level.

The conference will attempt to discuss methods of avoiding similar situations while sticking to the demands of live broadcasting and 24-hour television.

George Alagiah, the BBC's Southern Africa Correspondent who will speak at the conference, said: "There are two types of reporting here, we can evoke a response from an audience and that's legitimate.