Bob Geldof sat uncomfortably in a vast field of igneous rocks scattered apparently at random among the sere grass. But the rocks had been placed deliberately on the volcanic soil of the great plateau which had been lifted by magma from the earth\u2019s mantle millions of years ago to form the mountains which are the roof of Africa. Each stone marked a communal grave in which between eight and 20 people were buried.<\/p>\n
\u00a0Tens of thousands of children, women and mainly elderly men were interred here in the fields of Korem when famine swept the desiccated Ethiopian highlands in 1984\/5. Around a million are said to have died. A sizeable number of them perished here on the great plain where stood the camp of 300,000 people who had fled their homes, days and weeks walk away in the remote mountain fastness. They had come to Korem in the hope of finding food. But many found nothing except a place to sit in slow silent eye-glazed apathy as they waited to die. Twenty five years ago I had been in that terrible camp and watched the tardy response of the international community arrive too late to save so many individuals.<\/p>\n
It was around the same time that Bob Geldof had first come to Korem a few weeks after he galvanised the pop world to make the Band Aid record which was to go on to become the biggest fundraising effort in human history. \u00a3100 million was given by the public for the stricken people of Africa.<\/p>\n
Last week he returned. And in the very place where so many people had died, he came face-to-face for the first time with some of the survivors. \u201cWhat I remember of the people was their immense dignity in the face of everything,\u201d he told them.<\/p>\n
They smiled wanly, and thanked him, but it was not how the victims remembered it. A quarter of a century on they told him how it really was.<\/p>\n
\u201cIt is a challenge to the imagination,\u201d said Gebremedhin Alemu, now aged 60, who had walked 100 kilometres with his wife and six children in search of food aid which took two years to materialise in adequate quantities. \u201cWe were reduced to a sub-human situation. When someone died, we went to bury him, and by the time we came back someone else had died.\u201d<\/p>\n
\u201cPeople were buried like animals,\u201d said Haile Melicot, now 50. \u201cThere was no system. No honour. People were just put into mass graves without anyone knowing who had been buried where. We were so weak that the aid agencies had to pay people to carry the bodies from the camp up here to the burial place.\u201d<\/p>\n
\u201cOur respect for you, our brother in hard times, is boundless,\u201d Gebremedhin told Geldof. \u201cAt a time when our dignity was questioned, you came and paid for people with energy to bury our dead.\u201d<\/p>\n
This was not what Geldof had expected. But the wave of gratitude, for whatever the perceived priorities of the one-time famine victims was overwhelming and humbling. \u201cWe have just come back to pay our respects,\u201d the singer told the men.<\/p>\n
\u201cWe want you to pass on our thanks to the brothers and sisters outside Ethiopia who helped us,\u201d said Alana Abraham, 52, who had arrived at Korem with three brothers and was the only one of his family to survive.<\/p>\n
\u201cIs there anything else we could do for you?\u201d asked Geldof. In reply the men told him of their lives since, of years of good harvests, of the economic booming of the little town, of plenty and prosperity. \u201cOne farmer even has a minibus,\u201d said Alana Abraham in total awe.<\/p>\n
But there was one thing they lacked, because it was not a priority for the government or within the development mandate of the aid agencies. They would like a fence around the mass grave areas \u2013 both the Christian and the Muslim one \u2013 to stop animals from trampling on the dignity of the dead.<\/p>\n
Band Aid would build one, Geldof said, from the royalties which still, 25 years on, come trickling in. The joy of the survivors took him utterly by surprise. They shrieked their pleasure, hugged the Irishman and turned around to share the good news with the rest of the crowd.<\/p>\n
\u201cIf we lose our sense of shared humanity,\u201d said Geldof quietly, as he walked away to the church at the other side of the graveyard, \u201csomething withers inside us\u201d<\/p>\n
***<\/p>\n
There are those who have said that Band Aid, and everything that sprang from it, was a waste of time. More than two decades on and millions of people in Ethiopia and across East Africa are again facing severe food and water shortages after three years of poor rains. The Ethiopian government last month appealed to the international community for 159,000 tons of food aid to feed 6.2 million people this year. The World Food Programme says 14 million will need feeding \u2013 and warns that the rich world is once again dragging its feet. Its stocks are so low it has cut rations from 15 kilos of cereal per person per month to just 10.\u00a0 For those on the edge that means just two bowls of porridge a day instead of three.<\/p>\n
The higher estimates made by the aid community area causing tensions with the Ethiopian government, as Geldof discovered when he began his week long return to the country by calling on the prime minister, Meles Zenawi, with whom the singer served on the Commission for Africa in 2005.<\/p>\n
\u201cBand Aid was needed in it\u2019s time. There\u2019s no question, you made a difference, which helped Africa,\u201d Meles told Geldof at the end of a two hour meeting, \u201cBut when partnership becomes patronising that\u2019s bad for the father and the son will never grow up\u2026 Since the end of the last famine our overriding aim has been to make sure that there isn\u2019t another one. We\u2019ve put in systems to alert us to that and mechanisms to reverse the problems that led to it. We\u2019ve had several droughts but no famine over the past 18 years.\u201d<\/p>\n
One of those schemes is a Safety Net programme which gives food to 7.6\u00a0 million people in exchange for labour on public works for part of each year. It saves them from having to sell their animals if their crops fail. But it allows the UN to add that seven million to the poorest six million and insist that 13 million of the country\u2019s 83 million people rely on foreign handouts to survive.<\/p>\n
Meles is clearly irritated by this. \u201cIt conveys a message that Ethiopia is helpless which is only wrong; it is debilitating,\u201d he told Geldof. \u201cThey may be acting from good motives but you can\u2019t shock people with high figures every year; there\u2019s no need for it; it won\u2019t get any extra aid; and it creates the image of permanent crisis\u201d.<\/p>\n
Nor was the Ethiopian leader pleased at the Western media\u2019s focus on the 25th<\/sup> anniversary of the famine and the suggestion from some that nothing has changed. \u201cIt is not just a lie. It is also disempowering,\u201d Meles said. \u201cIt implies that all the efforts in the meantime have been useless \u2013 and that leads to paralysis rather than action. Many people are working their hearts out, and they have made real progress \u2013 not enough perhaps \u2013 but real progress.<\/p>\n So how much have things changed? Geldof embarked a week on a whistle-stop tour of projects which Band Aid has supported to find out.<\/p>\n ***<\/p>\n The group of mothers sitting in the shade of a thorn tree in the village of Abinet, in Wollo, some 500 km to the north of Addis Ababa, scarcely looked up as Geldof arrived. They were studying a childcare picturebook whose messages were obvious enough even to those who could not read. A set of scales dangled from one of the branches from which each child in turn was suspended and weighed.<\/p>\n In the centre of the book was a graph on which the women had been shown how to plot the weight of their baby. Two pre-printed lines, denoting average progress for girls and boys, enabled them to see how well their child was thriving. Those whose graphs were below the norm were asked to walk up the road to the village clinic.<\/p>\n Inside a 25-year-old villager Nazret Hilot was placing a measuring bracelet around the biceps of each child. Those who were below 11cm were placed on a supplementary feeding programme. Each was given a silver foil sachet with the words Plumpynut on it.\u00a0 It was an enriched peanut butter paste. There were just nine mothers inside the clinic.<\/p>\n They told Geldof their stories. One said her breasts were just not producing enough because food was getting scarce since there had been no rains and therefore no harvest. Another had had twins and could not manage to feed two little mouths. Several had had a second child and found that its one-year-old elder sibling was becoming malnourished.<\/p>\n \u201cThis is a real revolution in caring for children,\u201d Geldof was told by Ted Chaiban, the head of UNICEF which is running the feeding programme with Band Aid funds. \u201cInstead of the families having to come to the health care it comes to them. The government has trained 30,000 health workers like this, two for each kebele (village).\u201d Then the Plumpynut does not need diluting like the old therapeutic foods did so there\u2019s no risk of contamination with dirty water, which happened in 1985. Nor is there the need for people to gather in squalid insanitary camps. \u201cAnd 200 tons of the food are made are being made here in Ethiopia every month. It\u2019s a huge advance to in dealing with severe and acute malnutrition.\u201d<\/p>\n The health worker, Nazret,\u00a0 had 6,854 people in her care, she explained. \u201cI give instruction in sanitation, latrine construction, hand washing, correct use of anti-mosquito bednets, childbirth, family planning and HIV awareness,\u201d she said. \u201cI have delivered 16 babies so far and not had to call for any assistance.\u201d<\/p>\n One of the requirements is that the kebele health workers are local, so they are known and trusted. \u201cI had to be a graduate from the 10th grade and known to be of good habits,\u201d she told Geldof when she was asked how she got the job. The singer laughed.<\/p>\n \u201cHow many children do you all have \u2013 or want,\u201d he asked. The reply was that they wanted families of between six and 10 children. That may change. \u201cUse of family planning has risen from 7 per cent in 2000 to 27 per cent today,\u201d said Nazret, consulting her charts.<\/p>\n \u201cAll this is a big advance,\u201d the Unicef man told Geldof. \u201cThere are still some issues to sort out about whether or not health workers are quick enough in recognising complications to refer them to the local hospital. But for 95 per cent of cases it\u2019s a major step forward. And that\u2019s important in a country where, even in the best years the 1 or 2 per cent of the population who are the poorest of the poor are going to be in some difficulties. A lot fewer children are dying.\u201d<\/p>\n It\u2019s a position which is reflected nationally. Though 35 per cent of Ethiopian children are malnourished, and 40 per cent are stunted when they start school, the number who die below the age of 5 is down 40 per cent on what it was 15 years ago. A shocking 381,000 children died from preventable causes last year but there is clear progress. Cases of malaria have been reduced by two-third since 2006, with the number of deaths halved thanks to the government spraying a million houses and the Global Fund and the Gates Foundation distributing a massive 20 million bednets.<\/p>\n \u201cWho says aid doesn\u2019t work,\u201d spluttered Geldof as he leaves the clinic.<\/p>\n ***<\/p>\n There was general merriment in the Band Aid party en route to the next place. It had been billed as a \u201cchild friendly school\u201d. Aren\u2019t all schools supposed to be that, some wag inquired. \u201cMine wasn\u2019t,\u201d grumbled Geldof of the Holy Ghost Fathers who educated him at the prestigious Blackrock College, though interestingly later in the week he encountered Fr Jack Finucane, a retired member of the order, who ran operations for the Irish aid agency Concern in Ethiopia throughout both the 1974 and 1984 famines. \u201cAh you\u2019re the embodiment of all the values we wanted to inculcate in our boys,\u201d twinkled the old Irish priest. \u201cFuck off,\u201d replied the secular saint.<\/p>\n So what does a child un-friendly school look like, Indrias Getachew of UNICEF was asked. \u201cOne where the children sit on the floor rather than at desks,\u201d he replied tartly, \u201cwhere the floor is mud rather than easy-to-clean concrete, where the children are lectured at rather than learning in an interactive style, where there are no toys and playground equipment, and where there are no separate latrines for girls and boys.\u201d<\/p>\n It was a cautionary admonition. All the things that would be taken for granted in a\u00a0 school in England are not the norm in Ethiopia. \u201cSeparate toilets for girls is particularly important,\u201d explained Indrias, \u201cbecause having to share latrines is one of the biggest reasons for girls dropping out of school as they get older.\u201d<\/p>\n The children were out in force to cheer as Geldof arrived at Hentalo Wajirat an hour\u2019s drive out of Mekele, the capital of Tigray and one of the other epicentres of the 1984 famine. But it was not enforced enthusiasm. Private conversations with the pupils revealed their fierce pride in an institution so poplar that it has to run a shift system to get all 1,300 children kids a place behind a desk\u00a0 Its 26 teachers work both mornings and afternoons ensuring that class sizes can be kept to between 30-50 rather than the 80-100 as is the local norm.<\/p>\n The pupils sang, danced, walked on their hands, played football and volleyball and watered the guava trees they had planted for the Millennium. They had been asked to plant two each but had done three. \u00a0The invention was boundless. \u201cLook at that,\u201d said Geldof, pointing to a tv set made from an old box with a scroll of paper ingeniously rolled through it. They had no microscope but had made a cardboard one so pupils would recognise a real one when they saw it.<\/p>\n \u201cSo it was all a waste of time,\u201d expostulated Geldof with heavy irony. \u201cThe naysayers make me puke\u201d The angry young man of 1985 has matured into an angry old one.<\/p>\n It is not just one school. The numbers in school have trebled since the famine and the overthrow of the military dictatorship of the Mengistu regime in 1991. School enrolment has doubled since 2001 so that now 71 per cent of Ethiopian children are in education. That still leaves out 3.7m children but new schools are being built in many poor areas. School fees have been abolished. \u201cAll this is the fruit of the campaigning to drop the debt,\u201d said Geldof. \u201cEthiopia\u2019s annual interest on debt was slashed from $195m in 2001 to $86m in 2007. The extra money has gone into schools and hospitals.\u201d<\/p>\n ***<\/p>\n Yet there still remains the vexed question of how Ethiopia can produce enough to feed itself. Another of the organisations Band Aid has widely funded, Oxfam, has just produced a report called \u201cBand Aids and Beyond\u201d which argues that the rich world needs to adopt a new approach to humanitarian emergencies. Instead of shipping in huge quantities of food when disasters occur we should be structuring our aid so that it prevents such crises in the first place.<\/p>\n Some 70 per cent of humanitarian aid to Ethiopia comes from the United States. Since 1991 some 94 per cent of \u00a0that \u00a0has been in the form of food shipped over from the USA. (By contrast Britain\u2019s aid is in cash which allows the food to be purchased \u2013 far more quickly \u2013 in the parts of Ethiopia which have grain surpluses, and which creates an incentive for local farmers to produce more). And every $1 of US food aid costs American taxpayers another $2 in transport costs.<\/p>\n Worse than that food aid may keep people alive but it does not tackle the underlying causes that continue to make people vulnerable to disaster year-after-year. \u201cDrought does not need to mean hunger and destitution,\u201d said Nick Martlew, Oxfam\u2019s humanitarian policy adviser in Addis, and author of the report. \u201cIf communities have irrigation for crops, grain stores, and systems to conserve rains then they can survive despite what the elements throw at them. It is essential that donors do more to back programmes that manage the risk of the disaster before it strikes, such as early warning systems, creating strategically positioned stockpiles of food, medicine and other items, and irrigation programmes\u201d.<\/p>\n Over the years Band Aid has backed a number projects designed to show the way on this. In Tigray, which was one of the most environmentally blasted areas in 1984, Band Aid has backed Rest, which was formerly the welfare arm of the Tigray rebel movement and which is now the region\u2019s major indigenous NGO, in a project to restore a devastated water catchment area. Its official title is the \u201cManaging Environmental Resources to Enable Transitions to more sustainable livelihoods\u201d project which everyone calls Meret. Geldof & Co visited one part of the scheme which has improved life for 1.4m people with unreliable supplies of food. It offered them food aid in return for work on the project to revive the land\u00a0 with sustainable land use.<\/p>\n Ibrahim Ali is one such beneficiary. But like most of his fellow farmers in the Raya Valley he was intensely suspicious when the government men from Rest arrived eight years ago. \u201cThey wouldn\u2019t even let us on their land to study it,\u201d said Teklewoine Assefa of Rest, \u201cthey assumed that we were going to take it from them.\u201d They were so hostile that they pretended to be afraid that the black irrigation pipes were snakes. \u201cThey cut them up in the night and did a quarter of a million birr (about \u00a321,000) worth of damage.\u201d<\/p>\n Eight years later Ibrahim has just harvested his first crop \u2013 onions. \u201cThe people who came to buy them offered 3.25 birr a kilo,\u201d he told Geldof. \u201cSo I got on my mobile phone to someone in the market in Mekele and found they were 4 birr there. I rented an Isuzu (truck) for 1600 birr and sold there. Now I have options, I can sell here or there. or wait a few days if I think the price will rise.\u201d<\/p>\n He made a handsome profit. From it he repaid the loan he had taken from the micro-finance arm of the National Bank of Ethiopia \u2013 which has 190 sub-offices throughout Tigray \u2013 and paid a couple of dozen labourers who had helped with the weeding and harvest. \u201cNow I am going to rebuild my house and send my two sons to school. Abdurahaman, who is 8, wants to be a pilot.\u201d His fellow farmers laughed at the thought but Geldof shrugged his shoulders. \u201cWith education their lives will be more different than their father\u2019s generation can imagine,\u201d he said, as he left Ibrahim to prepare the land for his next crop.<\/p>\n \u201cI will plant wheat,\u201d the farmer said. \u201cWith this irrigation,\u201d he added, pointing to the plastic sheets between the rows of pipes which ensures that the water goes onto the plant roots, \u201cI will get three harvests a year\u201d.<\/p>\n The sadness is that the Meret project, which has been widely backed by the World Food Programme, is having its funding halved in the year to come. The WFP\u2019s watershed management expert, Dr Mohamed Diab, pulled a face when asked why. It was a question above his pay grade. \u201cIt took 10 years to get the $60,000+ funds for this,\u201d he said. \u201cTo scale it up to the whole watershed would need $300,000 over 10 years.\u201d<\/p>\n Geldof was outraged. \u201cThe G8 promised an extra $20bn a year for agriculture at its summit in L\u2019Aquila this year the G8,\u201d he said. \u201cWe must make such they keep their promise.\u201d<\/p>\n ***<\/p>\n In the end, however good are such exemplary projects, it all comes down to politics. With Geldof throughout the trip was Jamie Drummond, the master strategist for the One campaign, the group set up by Bono and Geldof, with funding from Bill Gates, to lobby the US Congress. It is an American version of Make Poverty History, but it has kept going where the UK equivalent wound up. It has two million members.<\/p>\n \u201cBand Aid created much more than a collection of projects,\u201d said Drummond. \u201cIt changed the way people thought about the developing world. It shifted people from thinking about charity to looking at the underlying structures of what keeps people poor. Out of Band Aid and Live Aid came Comic Relief, Jubilee 2000, Drop the Debt, the Trade Justice campaign, and Make Poverty History. They changed the agenda to lobbying for a change in political and economic policies.\u201d Politicians like Bill Clinton and Tony Blair and Gordon Brown were all children of Live Aid.<\/p>\n Debt was cancelled because of the movements which were spawned by Band Aid. They came to their climax with the lobbying of the Gleneagles G8 summit, where Tony Blair, who chaired the meetings, opened the door to give the lobbyists direct access to the world leaders. \u201cIt was a genealogy which can be traced directly back to Band Aid.\u201d<\/p>\n But the politics is national as well as international. What turned drought into famine in 1984 was the untenable land policies of the Marxist government which had overseen a drop in GDP year after year. The present government has made mistakes too. It encouraged farmers to take loans to buy better seeds and fertilisers and produce a bumper crop in 2001. \u201cBut the roads were so bad they couldn\u2019t get their crop to market and there weren\u2019t adequate stores or grain silos so a lot of it rotted,\u201d one UN food expert privately told Geldof. \u201cWhen the lenders came back for their money the farmers couldn\u2019t pay and fell into debt. It made them distrust the agricultural advisers who had told them to take the loans.\u201d<\/p>\n The government learned from that. A massive road-building programme is underway. \u201cEvery day I\u2019ve seen a different major highway under construction,\u201d Geldof said. That is not all. There is building work everywhere. Factories, power stations, dams, hydroelectric plants and blocks of apartments. In Addis Ababa the city council is building 54,000 houses. Ethiopia has never seen such a construction boom.<\/p>\n Behind much of the new work are the Chinese. In a restaurant in Mekele Geldof came across three Chinese businessmen, with a female translator in a miniskirt and high heels,\u00a0 who had brought their own instant pot noodles with them to eat. \u201cDo have a pot,\u201d said one businessman hospitably. \u201cWe have got loads back at base.\u201d<\/p>\n Pot noodles are not all they have brought. China is ploughing billions into Ethiopia and in much else of Africa. This year China is set to overtake the US as Africa\u2019s biggest trading partner. \u201cWe are now in a race with China for influence in Africa,\u201d said Geldof afterwards. One of the several diplomats who briefed Geldof agreed. \u201cThe days of a progressive consensus between the UK and Nordic countries on aid may be numbered as those countries pay for the global financial stimulus,\u201d he said. \u201cCountries like China and Turkey and others in the East are providing money that Africa needs without the West\u2019s conditions about human rights and good governance.\u201d<\/p>\n Geldof, like many in the West, has reservations about the Ethiopian government\u2019s human rights record. It arrested a hundred opposition politicians after the last election and charged them with treason (they have since been released) and recently it passed a law requiring \u201cregistration\u201d of all NGOs which get more than 10 per cent of their funds from overseas. But overall Meles Zenawi presides over a benign Ethiopia characterised by relative peace, stability and economic growth.<\/p>\n Everywhere privately-owned businesses, factories, banks and hotels are springing up. Ethiopia last year rose 29 places in the World Bank\u2019s Starting A Business index. Addis has regular traffic jams, a sure indicator of economic success. Out in the country the peasant farmers have better shoes and fewer eye infections than before. \u00a0The Economist<\/em> has forecast Ethiopia to be the 5th fastest growing economy in the world in 2010. Already the fastest growing non-oil economy in Africa some even talk about it overtaking Kenya as the biggest economy in East Africa.<\/p>\n Back in Addis Geldof visited one such optimist. Eleni Gabre-Madhin was an economics student at Cornell in New York when the 1984 famine struck. \u201cI couldn\u2019t understand how a million people died in the north when there was a food surplus in the west and south. She studied how markets work and ended up as a senior economist at the World Bank where she developed the dream of building a market mechanism to protect the African farmer.\u00a0 Last year she persuaded the government to set up Africa\u2019s first Commodities Exchange.<\/p>\n \u201cEveryone was always talking about cutting out the middlemen. But I knew that, if they worked effectively, traders could benefit everyone,\u201d she told Geldof before inviting him to ring the bell to begin that day\u2019s trading in Sidamo coffee. \u201cUnder the traditional system farmers in one area all go to market at the same time. So the price drops, and they sell when prices are lowest. Most farmers sell\u00a0 to a trader who sells to an exporter and who often does not pay them for six months. But under our system, with 30 networked warehouses in different parts of the country, they don\u2019t all deposit in our clearing house at the same time. And when they sell they get the money the next day.\u201d<\/p>\n The Addis Commodities Exchange now handles $400m plus of export coffee and the exporters, traders and the co-operatives which have 848,000 small farmers are all pleased with the system. And the transparent competition is creating an incentive which is forcing the quality of the lower grades of coffee up.<\/p>\n ***<\/p>\n Were the world standing still things might be looking up for the new generation who have been changing Africa\u2019s storyline. But it is not. Worldwide recession has had an adverse impact on Africa too. The global rise in the price of oil has increased the cost of transport across this vast continent and the price of food imports has soared. Ethiopia\u2019s earnings from coffee are down 35 per cent in one year because of a collapse in commodity prices on world markets \u2013 though the price is now rising again.<\/p>\n \u201cThe old deal was that aid buys a poor country time to get the economy right,\u201d Geldof mused before the last leg of his journey. \u201cThat\u2019s what Ethiopia\u2019s been doing. But suddenly something else is happening that changes the rules entirely.\u201d<\/p>\n After a long and bumpy two hour drive into the hills, outside Bahir Dar in the north of the Amhara region, Geldof climbed a lung-bursting high-altitude hill to sit with a group of around 80 farmers. They had travelled from across Debre Tabour province to meet him. It was billed as a climate change conversation.<\/p>\n \u201cThe main rains should start in June and go on till October,\u201d a farmer named Ayano Damostolds him. \u201cNow they start in July and finish in August; the rains come late and end early. Each year it gets worse. We are now a drought place like only the lowlands were in our grandfather\u2019s day. The rivers and stream should run until May but they are drying up in December.\u201d<\/p>\n \u201cAll this has impacted women, children and old people most,\u201d said a female farmer, Amoghu Zemadu. \u201cThe women have to travel long distances to fetch water. Pregnant women have aborted. The children are left alone at home crying.\u201d<\/p>\n \u201cOur older children are leaving,\u201d said Haile Woldeya. \u201cMy son left three years ago and my daughter two years ago, to find work in the town in Humera. They will not come back unless things here get better.\u201d<\/p>\n \u201cWe are restricting family size using contraceptives and birth spacing,\u201d said Natua Saya, a woman at the back of the crowd. \u201cWhat is the point of having more children if they are all going to leave and go to Humera?\u201d<\/p>\n Other behaviour is changing. \u201cWe don\u2019t have big parties at feasts, saints days\u00a0 and weddings as we used to have,\u201d Natua Saya added. \u201cAnd we used to leave things outside and no-one would touch them but now we have to bring them into the house because someone might steal them.\u201d<\/p>\n To combat this, said another farmer, Haile Wandaya, \u201cwe are planting trees, making compost, constructing terraces to prevent soil erosion and irrigating where possible. We have some places in every village where trees are planted where animals and humans are not allowed to go. We have stopped all year round grazing; we now grow grass and cut it to take to the animals rather than allowing them to roam in these protected areas.<\/p>\n \u201cOur grandfathers didn\u2019t understand that cutting down trees was bad for the land,\u201d he concluded. \u201cJust like your grandfathers didn\u2019t know that emissions from your\u00a0 factories could change our weather. We are all responsible.\u201d<\/p>\n Geldof listened, and finally spoke. \u201cWe will be taking all this back to our politicians and talking to them about the changes we have to make,\u201d he told the farmers. He would also tell them about the southern nomads who had changed the names of the months because they had been named after the weather and the two no longer matched.<\/p>\n He would tell them about the 1,068 farmers in the Hafersa Farmers\u2019 Cooperative\u00a0 whose coffee beans have become smaller or whose coffee bushes had ceased to produce.<\/p>\n He would tell them about how runners from the Assella\u00a0 community, which produced the internationally renowned athletes Haile Gebreselassie and Deratu Tulu, who once had run all day now had to stop training at 10am each morning because it was already too hot to run.<\/p>\n \u201cClimate change is not a future threat,\u201d Geldof said. \u201cHere it is a present reality. And it is hitting the poorest first, and will impact on them worst.\u201d<\/p>\n There are things which can be done to help poor people adapt. In Debre Tabour a four year programme of tree-planting and conservation is underway. \u201cThere has been a lot of progress in that time,\u201d said Dr Knut Huse of the Norwegian Forestry Group who was at the climate change conversation on the hill. Nationally forest cover is up from 3 to 15 per cent because the government has in recent years planted 800 million trees. \u201cIf the local people undertake good land practices here, planting trees and conserving soil and water, they could reclaim this area,\u201d said\u00a0 Dr Yeshanew Ashagrie of a local Amhara NGO Orda.<\/p>\n Up the road Oxfam has introduced British beehives to traditional African beekeepers, quadrupling their income, to offset their drop in revenue fro cereals knocked back by climate change. Such measures will help hard-hit Third World farmers cope with global warming, but much more is needed.<\/p>\n At the climate change conference in Copenhagen the African delegation, which will be led by Meles Zenawi, is thought likely to push for the issue to be treated as an international emergency. It will press for greenhouse gas emissions to be cut by 40 per cent by 2020 \u2013 double what the West wants.\u00a0 If warming goes up by more than 2 degrees, Meles Zenawi fears, rainfall will fall in Africa by 50 per cent and GDP will fall between 5 and 7 per cent. It wants big payments from the rich polluters to help it adapt.<\/p>\n \u201cWe will take what you have said back to Europe and the United States,\u201d Geldof pledged.<\/p>\n ***<\/p>\n Back in Korem there was a new building to open. With the money raised from the Live Aid DVD the Band Aid Trust have paid for a new hospital there which will serve 250,000 outpatients.<\/p>\n \u201cNo more deaths from hunger,\u201d read the banners as the crowds cheered in Geldof the hero. He was applauded everywhere he went last week \u2013 in markets, hotels, office and restaurants. Even the control tower at Mekele airport passed on their gratitude along with air traffic clearance for the Band Aid plane.<\/p>\n There was one other banner, in Amharic. Translated it read: \u201cOur future is in our own hands.\u201d Until climate change reared its ghastly gaseous head it might have been.\u00a0 But no more. No more.<\/p>\n \n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" Bob Geldof sat uncomfortably in a vast field of igneous rocks scattered apparently at random among the sere grass. But the rocks had been placed deliberately on the volcanic soil of the great plateau which had been lifted by magma from the earth\u2019s mantle millions of years ago to form the mountains which are the […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[18,35,40],"tags":[173],"class_list":["post-1423","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-africa","category-aid-development","category-ethics","tag-ethiopia"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/paulvallely.com\/archive\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1423","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/paulvallely.com\/archive\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/paulvallely.com\/archive\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/paulvallely.com\/archive\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/paulvallely.com\/archive\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=1423"}],"version-history":[{"count":16,"href":"https:\/\/paulvallely.com\/archive\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1423\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":7970,"href":"https:\/\/paulvallely.com\/archive\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1423\/revisions\/7970"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/paulvallely.com\/archive\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=1423"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/paulvallely.com\/archive\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=1423"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/paulvallely.com\/archive\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=1423"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}