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Mengistu’s plan might have been effective as a military strategy, but it ravaged the Ethiopian economy. Naivete about Africa and Africans, socialism, economics, and the challenges of effectively administering humanitarian aid. It was Geldof, who the previous day had told George to drop what he was doing and get to London stat to perform a song he had co-written with Ure. But it turns out that writing a song and raising millions of dollars for food assistance in Africa was the easy part.
If people were hungry in the highlands, send them off to the lowlands where productivity was high and land was plentiful. In 2018, Abiy Ahmed ended the country’s 20-year war with Eritrea, and was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize. A quarter of a century on, we’re still arguing about the roots of the problem, let alone the solution, and—though there has been progress—Ethiopia’s food insecurity gets worse, not better.As Ethiopians have pointed out ever since, they did of course know it was Christmas because the starving were mainly Christian,” Gill notes.
Please do not edit the piece, ensure that you attribute the author and mention that this article was originally published on FEE. If you visit Korem today, you can still see evidence of its works, including a hospital completed on the twenty-fifth anniversary of the famine with proceeds from Geldof and co.The assembled cast of performers had 24 hours to record in the studio, which was made available to them freely by producer Trevor Horn.