Feed the world? Band Aid 25 years on
Ethiopia's leaders won't admit it, but famine has returned to East Africa. Andrew Johnson reports
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Band Aid organiser Bob Geldof on a visit to Ethiopia in 1985
Where are they now? Not everyone on the Band Aid single made it to mega-stardom
It's Christmas time (nearly) and quite soon it will be impossible to switch on the radio without being bombarded by the preachy strains of a slightly shambolic Christmas song recorded 25 years ago in an effort to feed the world.
Band Aid's "Do They Know It's Christmas?", written in haste by Bob Geldof of the Boomtown Rats and Midge Ure of Ultravox, was unprecedented. Shocked by the BBC newsreader Michael Buerk's report of the famine in Ethiopia, which claimed a million lives, and the distressing footage of children with distended stomachs in a bleak African landscape, Geldof and Ure strong-armed some of the biggest names of the 1980s music scene into making the charity record.
Geldof, whose own career was on the decline, pledged that every penny would go to the cause. He even faced down Margaret Thatcher's government which initially refused to waive VAT on the single but later relented.
So at dawn on a bleak 24 November, Ure and Geldof turned up at the London studio of the record producer Trevor Horn, which he had donated for 24 hours as he was not able to work on the track. The two musicians were armed with backing recorded the previous evening at Ure's home studio.
It was also the perfect news story, and the world's media were on hand as the biggest acts of the 1980s – Spandau Ballet, Duran Duran, George Michael, Sting, Bono and Adam Clayton of U2, Paul Young and Bananarama – turned up to record their contributions. Geldof even insisted that Boy George fly in from America – he turned up at six in the evening. Ure and Geldof worked late into the night mixing the record, before Geldof went on the radio the next morning to plug it.
The resulting single, bolstered by media attention, sold a million copies in the first week of its release in early December 1984, and went on to be the fastest-selling UK single of all time.
It stayed at No 1 for five weeks, clocking up sales of 3.5 million, the biggest selling UK single until Elton John's Princess Diana tribute, "Candle in the Wind", in 1997. Eventually, it raised £5m for famine relief. Two other versions – 1989's Band Aid II and 2004's Band Aid 20, which both also hit No 1 – raised millions more. There was more money from the Live Aid concert in 1985 and 2005's follow-up, Live 8.
In all, Geldof and Ure's wheeze – copied in America as USA for Africa – put more than £150m into famine relief. The Band Aid Trust still has an income of about £2m a year, which is spent in Ethiopia, Sudan, Uganda, Eritrea, Somalia and Nigeria.
It was meant to be the song that changed the world. Only it didn't. Twenty-five years on, famine stalks Ethiopia and the Horn of Africa again. As The Independent on Sunday reported in August, millions of people in the Horn of Africa are facing malnutrition and starvation in the worst food shortages since 1984.
The United Nations warned in June that as many as 6.2 million people in Ethiopia will need some kind of food aid in the next few months. But the true figure of those with insecure food supplies could be as high as 13.7 million. Twelve million Ethiopians received food from donor countries last year – Britain is the second biggest donor – most of it through the United Nation's World Food Programme. Aid agencies fear for this year's harvest because of poor rain and critical water shortages.
The government in Ethiopia, however, remains reluctant to use the word famine. Earlier this year, its prime minister, Meles Zenawi, said there was no danger of famine this year. Ethiopia's ambassador to Britain, Berhanu Kebede, insisted the problem was being tackled. "We are addressing the problem. Food is in the pipeline," he said.
Ethiopia doesn't want attention distracted from its achievements in education, trade and infrastructure. But its population has doubled to 80 million since 1984, and its rural economy is said to be less productive than that of medieval England.
"The [Ethiopian] government has just got to embrace the crisis and not be frightened of the statistics," Gareth Thomas, a minister with the Department for International Development, said. "It is different from 1984, but there's still huge need. There's got to be a recognition that if we are going to stop children from being malnourished and keep people alive, we have to have accurate information."
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Comments
Feeding a population so it is maintained at above the carrying capacity of the land might ease people's consciences, but is doomed to failure.
The rock bore has thus ensured that the Irish government has less tax revenue to give as foreign aid to poor countries as he and his rich colleagues have even more money!
More effort should be applied to Africa sorting out their own problems.
And it cues the all-too-predictable digs."Pompous" Bono. Not news, and, for that matter not really true. You'll have to show me a quote from Bono excoriating people for flying, owning laptops etc.
From what I can gather, his campaigning method seems in essence to be to bug the hell out of national and international leaders who have the power and the big bucks to effect change. You may disagree with what he wants to achieve, and/or argue about the effectiveness of this method compared to others, but what's wrong with his approach exactly? You may not like it, but his fame/ego/desire to do so opens doors - and minds - closed to others.
I don't feel like he's bugging me about anything! He's just become an easy target for the lazy-minded.
Meanwhile, and as it's his day job, I'll also add that U2's No Line is a really good album. Open your ears and listen to the title track, Breathe, I'll Go Crazy, Unknown Caller or Stand Up Comedy.
Agree with everything that is said about U2. They havent been relevent since 1993 and Bono preaches to the world yet is such a hypocrite.
Meles Zenawi is a dictator in the mould of Mengistu. But the West love him. People in Ethiopia and other Third World Countries suffer terribly because they are ruled by dictators of the pro-western or the anti-western variety. Newspapers like the Independent hide this immoral truth from the global public.
The only cure is fraud-proof voting systems - dictators of all hues will tumble like flies. Popular governments will take over. The mess will be fixed. The Third World will prosper. Oxfam and their ilk will have to close down. Bono and Geldof will have to think of new ruses to extract money from the global public.
Mr Alex Weir, Baghdad and Harare
The government today in Ethopia has some terrible flaws, but its better than in 1984. The roads are a bit better. Famine early warning systems are in place. There has been some improvement in agriculture. Progress is depressingly slow...but there has been some. That's not to diminish the current food crisis in parts of the county. Food aid is needed now, along with longer term investment in agriculture.
Aid to feed the starving is a humanitarian response to a problem that won't go away until the birth rate falls. The country cannot support its population when most are engaged in subsistence agriculture. Tribal unrest has always been about stealing cattle, goats, sheep, crops and land from neighbouring tribes because of population growth. Bob Geldof and the pop stars haven't begun to do anything useful with their wealth to deal with this: their combined wealth is tens of millions of pounds, enough to feed the starving in Ethiopia and to disarm the militias that roam the countryside that cause famine by stealing crops and livestock and dispossessing peasants of their land... when they have spent their own money and moved out of their large houses and tax havens, then we can see how serious they really are instead of telling us what to do.
Without good governance and peace, famine will return every decade or two, as no one in his right mind would invest in a country where all your hard work could be stolen any minute by either the Government or bandits.
It is demonstrated that the monetary system created
by the ruling European Christian Alliance was
specifically designed to remove ‘money with intrinsic value’
from the money-system of the world, and to replace it with
money that had no intrinsic value. Such non-redeemable paper
currencies could then be devalued. When they were devalued,
not only would it result in an unjust legalised theft of the wealth
of those who used the devalued currency but additionally, it
would become more and more expensive for such countries to
repay loans which were taken on interest. Eventually these
countries would be trapped with debts they could never repay,
and would thus be at the mercy of those whose suspiciously
large loans to them were meant to deliver precisely such control
over them. (See John Perkins, ‘Confessions of an Economic Hit-
Man’).
As money was devalued, the cost of property, labour,
goods and services in the territories of the devalued currencies
would become cheaper and cheaper for those who created the
monetary system. Eventually one part of the world could live
very comfortably while the rest of the world, with their
constantly devalued money, sweated and laboured in a new
slavery to keep the Alliance permanently rich and with
permanent first class tickets on the ship of life. As poverty
increased in the targeted countries, corruption naturally also
increased. Those who had the intellectual acumen of cattle
would then wonder loudly: why do for example African countries suffer
from so much corruption while the West (which had looted
their wealth and was living off their sweat) was so free from
corruption.
Then when the IMF forced privatization upon those whose
money had lost value, the Alliance could then buy out oil and gas
fields, power-supply companies, telephone companies, etc., in
such countries for a song and six-pence, i.e., for a price far less
than their true value.
It remains an enigma that Venezuela’s
Hugo Chavez could understand the exploitative role of the IMF
and could terminate Venezuela’s membership in that
organization, while the the 'scholars' in the African countries and
the 'scholars' of Islam remain amazingly silent on the subject.