Ethiopia: A Journey with Michael Buerk

This programme was broadcast in the UK on BBC Two on Sunday, 11 January, 2004 at 2100 GMT.

Twenty years ago the BBC's Michael Buerk reported from Ethiopia's "biblical" famine.

In this film, Michael travels back to Ethiopia and talks to many people whose lives have been permanently scarred by the horrific famine.

They speak of how the suffering has continued while they continue to wait for the rains, a tragic irony in a country known as the "water tower of Africa" because it has the biggest natural reserves of water in the continent.

Michael also follows the story of a young Red Cross nurse forced to choose which starving people would receive scarce food aid and be saved and who would be left to die.

Sir Bob Geldof speaks movingly about his personal crusade to help the Ethiopian people and the build-up to the Live Aid concert in 1985.

On his recent journey, Michael returns to the towns of Mekele and Korem and to the highlands, destroyed by civil war and scorched by drought.

Today, the situation is worse and twice as many people are suffering with starvation.

At the time we helped to save them, but have our efforts only served to make a terrible situation worse?