Thirty years on from the launch of the original Band Aid song, another recording of Do They Know It's Christmas? has been released to the public. The original effort raised $US200 million for famine relief in Ethiopia, and another version was released in 2004. But as there are more starving and hungry people in Africa now than before, what did it really achieve?
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A 2012 report by the UN's Food and Agriculture Organisation revealed that the number of people suffering chronic undernourishment in Africa rose from 175 million to 239 million between 1992 and 2012. This is in spite of the hundreds of millions of dollars raised by Band Aid, and the billions of dollars spent by the international community besides.
This version of Do They Know It's Christmas? is, I grant it, different. This is principally because the words have been cringingly altered to work Ebola into the song. It is so cringing, in fact, that the movie Love Actually comes to mind.
There is no reason to believe, however, that any more will be achieved in terms of public health than has been achieved in hunger relief. There is a simple reason for this: while pop stars love parading their public virtue, they are merely treating the symptoms of a bigger problem instead of treating the problem itself.
In 1984 and 2004, the root cause of hunger wasn't so much crop failure as corrupt and dysfunctional governments, and civil war. The famines in Ethiopia and Darfur both followed civil wars. In Ethiopia, for example, the communist government had allocated 46 per cent of public funds to military spending, not building agricultural infrastructure, public health, nor protecting against famine.
In the Sudan, there was a civil war in which the government and its murderous Janjaweed militia attempted to ethnically cleanse the region.
The fact is, raising a crop in the middle of a civil war is almost impossible, and that is ultimately why people starve.
Of course, this Christmas, people will still want to buy the record and feel they are "doing something" for health in West Africa. This is entirely understandable, and even laudable, but nothing much will be achieved in the long run.
This year, some 1.45 million people will die from tuberculosis - more than 10 or 15 times the number Ebola will claim - so it is arguably the more pressing health problem. However, money won't be spent on this because it doesn't grab the headlines.
The fault is not in our wanting to fix problems. but in our unwillingness to do enough to prevent them.
The best way to protect against malnutrition or nasty epidemics is to eradicate corruption in developing nations, and to build proper education systems.
Governments that are free of corruption ensure proper allocation of resources to their people and make decisions free of self-interest. The governments in Africa that work have largely stamped out corruption.
Education is also key. People who are moderately educated can be taught about basic disease prevention, and learn to better grow and store their crops.
The problem for our pop stars is that educating people takes years. You first have to train the teachers and then build school systems that are effective. It's a lot harder than handing out bags of rice or paying foreign doctors to treat the sick. And the slow progress doesn't make for quick and simple television stories.
This Christmas I would encourage you all to spare a little for the poor of the developing world. Just think very carefully about how you do it.
