Twenty years after Live Aid, have we learned the lessons? asks TomArnold
Michael Buerk of the BBC brought the terrible images of the 1984 Ethiopian famine to the world. Bob Geldof responded by organising Live Aid, the first global pop concert. It raised over $100 million, mobilised a generation who stated it was unacceptable that people should die of hunger in the late 20th century, and helped save millions of lives.
Twenty years on, Buerk and Geldof went back to produce a compelling BBC film, shown last week, which compared the Ethiopia of today to the situation in 1984. The population has almost doubled, to 70 million. Per capita income has fallen from $180 to $109. Food production has not kept pace with population growth. In a "normal" year, between six and seven million people are dependent on imported food aid to survive. Last year, when the harvest failed, that figure rose to between 12 and 13 million.
There was some positive news. Even though this huge number of people are food insecure, the 1980s scenes of death by starvation are now largely avoided. The Ethiopian government has improved its early warning system for crop failure. The government and the international agencies have developed procurement and transportation systems which get the food to the people who need it, even if in insufficient quantities.
The programme asked whether Ethiopia will ever be able to break out of its cycle of poverty and hunger, and that question applies to many other countries in Africa.
A recent report by the UN Hunger Task Force, which has spent the past year studying the food problems of sub-Saharan Africa, tries to provide answers. The task force was established to draw up a plan to halve the number of hungry people in the world by 2015, one of the Millennium Development Goals which world leaders adopted in 2000. Even if this goal is to be achieved, 400 million people will still be hungry in 2015. In a world of such wealth and possibility, this limited ambition is a scandal.
The task force's analysis of the current situation is not especially hopeful: 200 million of the 800 million hungry people in the world live in sub-Saharan Africa. Globally, four million children die annually from hunger-related causes - a loss equivalent to the population of the Republic of Ireland.
Hunger is mainly a problem in poor rural communities where more than 80 per cent of the population depend on subsistence agriculture. Their problems include poor farming methods, falling soil fertility, and increasing pressure on the natural resource base. This is compounded by a lack of alternative income sources in rural areas. Women play a major role in producing and marketing food but their low status and lack of access to resources represent a serious block to development.
HIV/AIDS is undermining food production, causing three million deaths per year and leaving behind an imbalanced population of elderly and young people.
Against this bleak scenario, the task force offers three major recommendations:
Mobilise political action against hunger in both developing and developed countries;
Restore budgetary priority to agriculture as the engine of economic growth in developing countries. Build rural infrastructure and empower women;
Focus on actions that have proven successful in tackling hunger. These include improving the nutrition of vulnerable groups (mainly women and children under five), raising agricultural productivity on small-holder farms and improving the way local and regional markets work.
Given the poor record of the past 20 years, what are the chances of their being accepted? The crucial issue is the political will to tackle hunger seriously. But the jury remains out as to whether this will exists, either in developing or developed countries.
On the positive front, African governments have been providing more resources to agricultural and rural development in recent years. Donor agencies such as the World Bank are also increasing their allocations. The African Union summit meeting, to be held in Ethiopia in July, will focus on tackling hunger and promoting agricultural development. But it remains to be seen whether there is the political will to tackle issues such as land reform in Ethiopia, which is central to any long-term solution of that country's food problem.
In developed countries, changing domestic agricultural policies will be seen as an acid test of political will. The task force clearly acknowledges that agricultural policy change and trade liberalisation by developed countries will not, in the short to medium term, make any real difference to the hunger problems of Africa. The poorest countries already have significant access to the markets of developed countries: their problem is that they have little to sell.
However, if the current stalled round of WTO negotiations resumes, progress will have to be made on agricultural trade issues, even if these will mainly benefit the better-off developing countries. It is particularly important that early progress is made on such key issues as reducing US cotton subsidies which are damaging the livelihoods of poor west African farmers. The quid pro quo for the EU is likely to be reform of its sugar policy.
Solving African food problems depend on what I term the three Ps: politics - making the right short- and long-term decisions; policies, which learn from experience and are adequately funded; and passion, which should inform both.
We have to keep repeating, as Geldof did 20 years ago, that it is politically and morally unacceptable that any child should die because he or she does not have enough to eat. It really is as simple as that.