The first major relief efforts were made towards the end of the 19th century, in response to famines in China and India. The Northern Chinese Famine of 1876-79 is estimated to have taken as many as 10 million lives. The British were the ones with great interests and influence in the region, so it happened that it was a British missionary who called attention to the famine and appealed to the international community in Shanghai for money to help the victims. Luckily, a Committee was soon established, with the participation of not only missionaries, but also diplomats and businessmen, and an international network was set up to solicit donations. About the same time, a relief fund was set up in the UK, raising a good amount of money to help with the Great Famine in India.

For nearly a century though, relief efforts remained in private hands. In the meantime, the politicians in the globally influential countries had their hands full with international confrontation, rivalry and eventually, the First World War. Things hardly got any better and then the Second World War drained everybody's finances. The following Cold War kept the world divided.

It was only the Ethiopian famine in the mid 1980s and its million lost lives that brought the nations together again. That decade was marked by 24 hour news coverage by the freshly created CNN. Every event now seemed bigger, more important and with larger impact (BBC described the Ethiopian famine as being of biblical proportions and closest thing to hell on Earth.) Celebrity endorsement followed and government effort was mobilized. Response to disasters around the world became global.