Dubai: Bob Geldof returns to Ethiopia, which was ravaged by famines in the 1980s, to find that a great deal has changed — both for better and worse.
The tension between the positive and negative changes in Ethiopia, as in much of Africa, is palpable.
On the whole the country is making progress in a continent that has been doing likewise. Then there is the negative change — that of the climate.
Many of the villagers he met mark the mid-1980s as when they really saw how their weather patterns were changing. Since then, increasingly erratic rainfall has forced them to radically alter their farming practices.
People say reduced rainfall has cut their income from farming. This, in turn, strains the social fabric. Thefts are becoming more common and children are forced out of the home to work.
If allowed to spread and worsen to its logical conclusion, the kind of social disintegration we are now seeing in Ethiopia could have a chilling trajectory.
The developed world must partner as it has promised with the people of Africa, for the sake of the global economy as well as the global environment.
