Famine's deadly reprise

The rock stars came. They sang their hearts out and raised hundreds of millions of dollars that helped fill many empty bellies. Then they went.

That was 17 years ago, and the devastating drought which was tearing through the Horn of Africa is back. But the rock stars are nowhere to be seen and the problem that they had hoped to eradicate could be more serious this time.

Just as disastrously, large swathes of southern Africa are also parched. The World Food Programme estimates that 23 million Africans are hungry and that the number will rise dramatically in coming months.

The people behind the pop extravaganzas Band Aid and Live Aid were not the only ones tackling the crisis in Ethiopia in the mid-1980s.

Humanitarian groups like Care International and the Save the Children Fund were there, as they are now. But the mass appeal of the stars raised the profile of the calamity.

The world has changed since the heady days of new-wave pop. Economies worldwide have become market-driven and the gap between the haves of the developed world and the have-nots in Africa, Asia and Latin America has widened. Much of Africa has slipped into a financial abyss and is unable to help itself climb above the frequent cycle of droughts, floods and famines.

For decades, the developed world's approach was to respond to each crisis as it happened with food aid. That gave immediate relief to those people the aid workers could reach, but did not stop the problem from re-occurring.